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INTERVIEWER:  What do you feel about the indebtedness of sculpture to painting?  That painting leads sculpture?

LIPCHITZ:  There is no difference between painting and sculpture for me. A man is leaading a woman or woman leads man.  I do not think it is so.  They make a couple.  They go together.  There is more painting, yes.  Maybe poetry leads the arts.  In one epoch in which everything flourishes one can raise his voice above the others, but that does not mean he is more advanced...and anyway, what does it mean, 'advanced'?  Maybe one rises faster, but that means nothing.  After all, artists are not athletes -- one running a quarter second faster than the other.

INTERVIEWER:   I recall your much quoted concern about Leonardo's statement that sculpture is a mason's art.

LIPCHITZ:  Yes.  When I was a young man I was very upset by that...by the way a sculptor appears to other people.  I didn't know then the reasons behind Leonardo's statement.  I was young and took it as a truth.  I was always dreaming of making sculpture in a rapid way and that lead to my transparents.  You see, it doesn't matter how it goes.  The important thing is where you arrive.  I repeat, I don't see any difference between sculpture and painting, (beyond the techniques), because they are all going through the eye.  The eye is almost like part of the brain, even anatomically.  The brain is kept nervously in the power of