Seated Man 1925

Jacques Lipchitz's 'Seated Man' is a bronze sculpture in which geometric and curvilinear forms wrestle with the figure. It’s as if Lipchitz began with the idea of a person but let the material lead him. The figure emerges, not through replication, but reinvention. The smooth, curved bronze contrasts with the angles of the human form. The head is a cube, the body a mass of smoothed shapes; yet, somehow, it still feels like a man. I think about what it was like for him to work on this. Did he start with clay, building up and tearing down? Did he have a model, or just this idea of a person seated? It reminds me of Picasso and Braque, the way they broke down forms to find something new in the act of representing the world. What Lipchitz is doing here is a part of that conversation, a part of that ongoing attempt to make something new out of the oldest subject: ourselves.