August 12-18, 2004

art

The Chosen Son

Jacques Lipchitz, Prometheus Strangling the Vulture (1944-1953), 96 1/2 by 92 inches, bronze.

The PMA reconsiders the career of Jacques Lipchitz and his relationship with the city of Philadelphia.

by Robin Rice

Oh, for those innocent days when I derived childish pleasure from merely interjecting the name Lipchitz into adult conversation! And, of course, the artist's late lumpy brownish bronzes so resembled the forbidden word encoded in his name.

In today's adult world, Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) doesn't give us much to giggle at. An election year marked by growing violence in the Middle East frames the Philadelphia Museum of Art's retrospective of Lipchitz's oeuvre, drawn entirely from local collections. It perhaps unintentionally unites the historic and electoral importance of the city with the sculptor who, according to Michael R. Taylor, exhibition curator and author of a lucid essay in the current PMA Bulletin, called himself Philadelphia's "chosen son."

The productive and articulate artist was loved and respected by powerful Philadelphians such as collector Dr. Albert Barnes, who hired him to make relief panels for the Barnes Foundation building; R. Sturgis Ingersoll, head of the board of directors of the PMA; and Dr. Froelich Rainey, Lipchitz's friend and the director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Lipchitz was popular with Philadelphian as well as national audiences when he appeared as a regular guest on a television program hosted by Rainey.

Lipchitz loved Philadelphia and its citizens, partly for the city's symbolic role in the democratic process. He respected the aesthetic acumen of Philadelphians so much that he fretted that his writhing 35-foot-tall Government by the People in the Municipal Services Building plaza might not be sufficiently abstract for them. What would he think today of those ridiculous game-board pieces that have joined his work? How about the Madame Tussauds-esque statue of Mayor Rizzo, who called Lipchitz's Government "sickening"?

Of course, nothing in the PMA show is aligned with either the Democratic or Republican candidates, but when considering the work of this sculptor, it is impossible to ignore themes of war, death and evil confronted head-on. Lipchitz's sculpture may be abstracted, but it seethes with content.

This is an artist who acknowledged weeping as he built the wax model for the fragile-seeming, flame-fluttering The Prayer (1943), a work made partly in response to his discovering details of the Holocaust. This is an artist who earlier encrypted his hate and fear of Hitler in the allegory of Prometheus Strangling the Vulture (original c. 1936). In mythology, the gods imprisoned the man who stole fire for humanity and set an eagle to devour his liver through eternity. There's a disturbingly graphic painting of this scene by Peter Paul Rubens in the PMA collection. Like the apple from the tree of knowledge, the fire of the gods gave humans control over their own destinies, perhaps too much control. But Lipchitz imagines that Prometheus utilizes his new power to escape and turn on his torturer, represented not as noble eagle of freedom but a carrion-eating vulture.

The anti-fascist message of this work was recognized by right-wing viewers, who destroyed it in 1938. A maquette of a later 1943 version, exhibited in Philadelphia in 1952 (where it won a gold medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts), happened to be the only work from Lipchitz's studio that survived a major fire. The Art Museum bought a bronze cast of it, enabling the sculptor to overcome his huge financial loss.

Lipchitz's monumental public works — the museum provides a map to the three major ones in Philadelphia — are characterized by bulging, roiling forms, often uplifted on a narrow base. The paradox of weight, mass and buoyancy is part of the essential tension in these pieces. The seeming fragility of the stemlike supports suggests Lipchitz's sense of human frailty. But the power with which these works dominate their settings suggests the indomitability of the human spirit. It's a paradox of struggle, pain, hope and will.

The young Lipchitz was playful and clever in his experiments as one of the few analytic cubist sculptors, already possessing that ability to represent substance while simultaneously negating it. The gallery containing a selection of his early smallish bronzes, including the carefree Sailor With Guitar (1914), is oddly unsatisfying. Each piece has something to offer, but a similarity of scale, perhaps, or the exaggerated lighting diminishes the impact of the group.

Throughout his career, but especially in the early years, the artist worked frontally. The back of any cubist work, for example, is clearly not the "interesting" part. Later, Lipchitz offers more perspectives and openings but often one does not feel a compulsion to move around his sculptures. Photographs are almost invariably taken from the front perspective. Nevertheless, this exhibition offers many rich and meaningful perspectives on an artist whose work is so familiar here in Philadelphia that it is easy to take him for granted. How lucky we are to always have an opportunity to say, "Lipchitz!"

Jacques Lipchitz and Philadelphia Through Aug. 22, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th Street and the Parkway, 215-763-8100