Born in Lithuania in 1891 and domiciled since 1941 in the United States, Lipchitz was from 1909 to the Second War World one of the outstanding figures of the School of Paris and one of the leaders of the revolution which gave new life to sculpture throughout the world.
It was to Cubism that Lipchitz, after his first youthful essays, finally turned towards 1914. Artists were to learn from it that the human body was not the be-all and the end-all of sculpture; that they might choose expressive deformation rather than anatomical correctness, and that imagination and reality should have equal rights.
Both in his work and personality Lipchitz has enjoyed a continuous ripening and development which from the Vowel Song of 1931to the Vierge d'Assy of 1948 and then to the Hagar of 1957 had led him to those pregnant forms, those intricacies of mass and contour, those contrasted volumes which, though exposing their projections to the light, allow it only a pale and allusive penetration of their grooves and hollows.
