Viewing page 45 of 168

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

96

Sun. Dec 5            
[[strikethrough]] April 5 [[/strikethrough]]

between potentiality & realization is too large to be taken as part of the "usual waste" attending ambitious effort in art.

These thoughts aptly voiced my own.

Lipchiz - Chagall, Soutine joined avant-garde, Paris, just before 1914  For all, it was their first look at museum art of the West. None of them ever got over it.

Soutine tried to reconcile modern with pre-Impressionist painting -

All three artists seemed to feel they had to prove their title to tradition by an express effort, whereas Picasso, Matisse, Leger & Derain, having been born into tradition, could take it more or less for granted.

Since 1930 Lipchiz has sought a contemporary version of the grand, epic style - (my "Sacrifice of Isaac) His conception of it remains somewhat old-fashioned - however, & the



97

Dec. 5
[[strikethrough]] April 6 [[/strikethrough]]

attempt itself to achieve it is often made too mechanically, by dint of the exaggeration & distortion of received forms. 

Most powerful & original work between 1925-30, when having abandoned the literal vocabulary of Cubism but still subscribing to its aims & understanding these more profoundly, he was able paradoxically to make its 'syntax' more intrinsically sculptural by making it more pictorial. Instead of transposing the angled planes of Cubist painting in solid polygonal volumes, he now began to feel them in terms exclusively of surface & line.

Best pieces of this period are the small quasi-abstract bronzes whose thin, perforated planes & calligraphic straps & ropes of metal spell out the new draughtsman's language of modernist sculpture