Viewing page 46 of 168

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

98

Dec. 5
[[strikethrough]] April 7 [[/strikethrough]]
  
- even more effectively perhaps than do Picasso's earlier Cubist constructions

Although they are amongst the most original works of our day & completely realized, they offer evidence of that arrogant badness of taste or judgement shown in his later work.

Cubism had sent Lipchitz towards construction - linear, open sculpture Afterwards he let his great native talent for modeling take him in other directions towards the mirage of the grand style.

He tried since '27 to marry the compact monolith of traditional sculpture & its chiaroscuro, to the open, linear forms of Cubist & Post-Cubist construction

His sketches in plaster & terra cotta generally superior to their overworked, muscle-bound final versions.

Since departing from Cubism his course has been haphazard, with no one direction leading into the next.



99

Dec. 5.
[[strikethrough]] April 8 [[/strikethrough]]

He has been unable to develop a style, a principle of inner control & consistency. It has meant the inability to refine, clarify & purify his conceptions in going from one work to the next, & the frequent inability to feel or know where he is going within the given work.

One wonders how an artist so uncertain of his felt aims can make such a great impression of strength, in failure as well as success. What the strength - the insistence on demonstrating it - does conceal - is Lipchitz's failure to orient himself independently in Western & Modern Art. He has the superlative & inalienable power to knead clay into massive, simple & energetic form. But he has lacked, since Cubism, a sure instinct for the combination & elaboration of forms and a sense - above all, of what art can & cannot do within the limitations given it by his own