Jacques Lipchitz: A Cubist Sculpture on the Theme of the Guitarist

According to Lipchitz, the memory of a street scene—a sailor playing a guitar in Mallorca—led him to explore the theme of the musician for the first time in 1914. The artist had arrived in Paris a few years earlier to enter the Beaux-Arts academy and flee Lithuania, where pogroms were on the rise, the artist was still searching for his identity. He studied academic techniques as well as modelling and working in plaster and, most importantly, met Juan Gris, Picasso , Modigliani and other artists. Their discovery of African masks…