- Artist
- Jacques Lipchitz 1891–1973
- Original title
- Tête
- Medium
- Painted plaster
- Dimensions
- Object: 228 × 146 × 139 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by the Lipchitz Foundation 1982
- Reference
- T03507
Catalogue entry
T03507 Head 1932
Painted plaster 9 × 5 3/4 × 5 1/2 (228 × 146 × 139)
Not inscribed
Presented by the Lipchitz Foundation 1982
Lit: Arnason 1969, repr.80 (bronze); Lipchitz 1972, p.127 and repr.112 (bronze)
There is another plaster of this sculpture in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo 1977, n.p., repr.), and the terracotta original is reproduced in Maurice Raynal, Jacques Lipchitz, 1947. It is likely that the plaster in the Kröller-Müller Museum, which is a better cast, was made at the same time as an early cast of a bronze, and that the Tate Gallery's plaster was made in the early 1960s. The monograph by Raynal also reproduces a similar terracotta of the same date with much larger cavities around the left eye and the left side of the skull. This ‘Head’ is a unique subject in Lipchitz's work, and he compared it to his sculptures of fragments of heads such as ‘Head and Hand’ (T03496) and ‘Head, Bust and Arms’ (T03498):
Some of these studies of head and hands were formal explorations of interior or negative sculptural space, and the interest in this problem led me in 1932 to a series of sketches of helmet or skull heads in which the interior space is open and enveloped by a skin or bone structure pierced with great eye holes (Lipchitz, loc.cit.).
[For T03397 and T03479 to T03534 the foundry inscriptions, and reproductions of casts in other materials in the books listed below, are recorded. Abbreviations used:
Arnason 1969 H.H. Arnason, Jacques Lipchitz: Sketches in Bronze, 1969
Lipchitz 1972 Jacques Lipchitz, My Life in Sculpture, 1972
Stott 1975 Deborah A. Stott, Jacques Lipchitz and Cubism, 1975 (reprinted 1978)
Otterlo 1977 A.M. Hammacher, Lipchitz in Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Otterlo, 1977
Centre Pompidou 1978 Nicole Barbier, Lipchitz: oeuvres de Jacques Lipchitz (1891–1973) dans les collections du Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1978
Arizona 1982 Jacques Lipchitz. Sketches and Models in the collection of Arizona Museum of Art, Tucson, Arizona. Introduction and catalogue by Peter Bermingham, 1982]
Published in:
The Tate Gallery 1982-84: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions, London 1986