Frequent Phoenix

Three times in his 62 years Jacques Lipchitz has had to rise from the ashes of disaster to pursue his career as a sculptor. When he was a youthful art student in Paris, his father, a Lithuanian contractor, lost all his money, told Jacques to give up and come home; Lipchitz got a part-time job, kept on with his studies. In 1941 the Nazis forced Lipchitz to flee from France; with only $20 to his name and some of his drawings, the sculptor had to begin all over again in the U.S. In 1952, just as he had recovered from this blow, a fire burned his Manhattan studio and all it contained into cinders and melted plasteline; Lipchitz got space in a Long Island foundry, resumed his work more vigorously than ever: in 26 days he turned out 26 small sculptures.

Last week the results of all this phoenixlike determination--and more than 40 years of dedicated sculpting--were on view at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art, which was staging the biggest Lipchitz retrospective show ever held in the U.S. The 98 pieces of sculpture and 15 drawings covered the entire work span of Lipchitz' life--from 1911, when he modeled conservative academic pieces, through his first experiments with cubism, and down to his current, free-swinging style.

In most of Lipchitz' work, there is evidence of a force and virility possessed by few contemporary sculptors, but, except for his earliest sculpture, there is very little conventional beauty in anything Lipchitz has done. Prometheus Strangling the Vulture II is typically powerful, but it is also unnecessarily cluttered. Mother and Child II shows a baby-burdened mother with stubby, handless arms outstretched in supplication for peace; there is a belly-blow force in the conception of the statue, but the emotion it produces is something like that evoked by the sight of open sores on a crippled, shuffling beggar: pity mixed with revulsion. Song of the Vowels is a more straightforward experiment with form and space; the curving harplike sides of the figure give it expanse and a sense of freedom.

Lipchitz himself is not at all convinced that his current style is the last word in the development of his sculpture. He is always changing his approach, hopes to keep doing so. He feels that the lesson he learned from the fire in his studio ("If you are thrown off a horse, you have to get right back on") is basically the same as that which is apparent in his current show. Says he: "One must go ahead. Life is an irreversible movement, and that's the way with sculpture . . . I think I will now start my career."

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