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5.

reminded of Nietzsche's statement about the artist: "His oneness with the primal source of the universe reveals itself to him in a symbolical dream picture."⁵

It is at this point that I see most clearly the relationship between Lipchitz's work and that of Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction" in which he searches for the First Idea, but these two artists are not alone in this intense search. In the whole Great Stream of art and literature perhaps no subject has been so deeply and consistently explored as the search for the source of life and Man's role in the great drama of life. Here too we understand what the critics mean when they mention time and again that Lipchitz's work is poetic.

Waldemar George: These statues affirm the desire to pass from a stage of representation or even interpretation, to a method of expression which approaches pure poetry.⁶

Maurice Raynal: Le surhumain et non le surréel, de cette conception découle d'un tempérament porte à l'amour de formes plus exaltantes, plus ivres de liberté, partant plus rares que toutes celles que pourrait imaginer un artiste, poète peut-être, mais poète mineur et qui ne s'inspirerait que du canevas de la réalité figurative.⁷

Henry Hope: Perhaps his sculpture is more effectively described in terms of poetry than in the vague language of current art criticism. In a broad sense, Lipchitz is a poet