Personal and professional papers of Jacques Lipchitz
1910–73
Jacques Lipchitz (22 August 1891-26 May 1973) was a French-American sculptor of the Cubist style. He was born to a Jewish family in Druskieniki, present day Lithuania, then a part of the Russian Empire. In 1909 he moved to Paris to study sculpture and, with some short gaps, stayed there until his emmigration to the USA in 1942. Lipchitz retained highly figurative and legible components in his work leading up to 1915-16, after which naturalist and descriptive elements were muted, and dominated by a synthetic style of Crystal Cubism. In 1920 Lipchitz held his first solo exhibition, at Léonce Rosenberg's Galerie L'Effort Moderne in Paris. Fleeing the Nazis he moved to the USA in 1942 and settled in New York City and eventually to Hastings-on-Hudson.
These digitised materials include 280 pages of his three notebooks showing the artist in his early days in Paris (1915-25), during the hardships of the war and before his ability as a sculptor was widely recognised. There are also around 1000 items from Lipchitz's personal and business correspondence, reflecting his connections with European artists (Moishe Kisling, Le Corbusier, Karl Teige), and his personal life, evident in his letters to his wife Berthe, parents, siblings, and close friends. There are 150 documents related to two of Lipchitz's artistic and political projects before the Second World War, namely his participation in the Paris International Exhibition of 1937 and his trip to the USSR in 1935. Also included are 50 of his drawings and several examples of rare printed materials, such as early Cubist and Futurist journals and the publications of emigre Russsian communities in Paris. Finally there are more than 1000 photographs, mostly of maquettes of his statues, but also of his family and friends.
- Collection Owner
- Jacques Lipchitz 1891–1973
- Collection
- Tate Archive
- Acquisition
- Presented to Tate Archive by Rubin Lipchitz, March 1989; the cataloguing and selective digitisation of this archive collection was supported by Mr Timm Bergold, 2023
- Reference
- TGA 897
451 objects in this collection
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Personal and professional papers of Jacques Lipchitz
451 Objects
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Correspondence
212 Objects
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Artworks
23 Objects
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Business papers
60 Objects
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Personal papers
18 Objects
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Writings
12 Objects
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Printed material
18 Objects
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Photographs
108 Objects
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Original sets of photographs
42 Objects
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Photographs of sculptures made by known photographers
7 Objects
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Photographs of sculptures made by unknown photographers
0 Object
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Indoor photographs of Jacques Lipchitz’s sculptures and models
0 Object
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Outdoor photographs of Jacques Lipchitz’s sculptures and models
3 Objects
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Photographs of drawings and sketches by Jacques Lipchitz
16 Objects
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Photographs of art works by other artists
5 Objects
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Photographs of people
35 Objects
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- Title
- Set 18 - Album-portfolio
- Date
- 1941
- Description
- Portfolio contains photographs of studies for the portrait bust of Professor Camille Soula (1941) by Jacques Lipchitz. Ten photographs are mounted on cardboard (all leaves are detached and numbered by the cataloguer separately, TGA 897/7/1/18/2-11). Each leaf holds a stamp 'Jacques Lipchitz', a number and the identical title: "Etude pour le Portrait (number) du Prof. Camille Soula. 1940-1941. Toulouse. Terre-Cuite'. No photographer is indicated. Most likely, this Album-portfolio was made by Lipchitz in Toulouse before fleeing to the USA.
The remaining photographs form five pairs, each consisting of one print and one negative (stapled to the print). The negatives are original, for the same photographs, and are mounted in portfolio. The prints are new. They are numbered as TGA 897/7/1/18/12-16, with prints numbered as 1/2 and negatives as 2/2 of the same number. They have the same study numbers on the back, as the mounted prints: "2", "3", "4", "7" and "8". - Reference
- TGA 897/7/1/18
