ArchiveExhibition
Jacques Lipchitz and the School of Paris
10 Nov 2022-21 Jan 2023
Marlborough
London W1S 4BY
Overview
Jacques Lipchitz (born Chaim Lipchitz in Druskininkai, Lithuania) was eighteen when he arrived in Paris in October 1909. Unlike other foreign artists who had settled in the French capital such as Picasso, Archipenko, Constantin Brâncusi and Amedeo Modigliani, Lipchitz had no previous academic training, and studied only briefly at the esteemed École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian. In 1912, he moved into a studio next to Brâncusi, and in 1913 was introduced to Picasso through Diego Rivera. Soon afterwards he embarked on what he referred to as his ‘proto-Cubist’ phase, the translation of pictorial experiments in Cubist painting into three-dimensional sculpture, representing figures as if seen from multiple angles and perspectives.
With a focus on Lipchitz’s Cubist phase, Jacques Lipchitz and The School of Paris explores the influence of the group of artists around him including Alexander Archipenko, Brassaï, Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso, before he moved to New York in 1941.
Marlborough’s long engagement with the work of Jacques Lipchitz was first realized within the merger between the former Otto Gerson Gallery and Marlborough Fine Art in 1963. Otto Gerson had become the successor to the Curt Valentin Gallery who had long been Lipchitz’s representative in the US. That year, the new Marlborough-Gerson Gallery hosted a memorial exhibition entitled Artist and Maecenas: A Tribute to Curt Valentin, marking Marlborough’s entry into the New York market. Since that time, the gallery has provided extensive support for the continuing legacy of this twentieth-century master. Jacques Lipchitz has been included in group and solo exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany; Musée National d’Art Modern, Paris, France; and Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, Valencia, Spain, among many others. In 2018-19 the Moscow Museum of Modern Art in Russia presented a major retrospective. Lipchitz’s work is featured in innumerable public collections worldwide, including Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Tate Gallery, London; Sprengel Museum, Hannover; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
