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4
1912 - 1920

The first surviving maquette is a cubist Head of 1914 (1). Before this date Lipchitz had passed from the academic classicism of his student days to a number of experiments in simplification and stylization in which some suggestion of cubist geometry was used in a rather tentative manner. The Head is related to the Sailor with Guitar of 1914 (    ), the most completely realized of Lipchitz' first cubist sculptures. They were both produced in Spain which Lipchitz visited with Diego Rivera and a number of other friends during the summer of 1914. He was caught there by the outbreak of World War I and it was some six months before he was able to return to France. The Head belongs to what Lipchitz calls his period of "naive cubism", being basically a geometric simplification of forms. However, the simplification is that of related sculptural masses rather than of facial anatomy. In this sense, it is well on its way to abstraction.

The next stage in the exploration of cubism is to be seen in a large Head, 1915, (   ) in which the features are subordinated to the point of almost complete abstraction. In this, a large, roughly rectangular mass is intersected by a central diagonal ridge which rises into two curving, opposed, horizontal shelves which suggest eye, eyebrow and ear. The whole is, however, essentially