Jacques Lipchitz as a Jewish Christ
Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) was mostly a follower of his period's more innovative artists but that does not mean that he lacked the visual perception to make sense of art. He had that in spades. The bronze, above left, of a Pierrot, a well-known character in Italy's Commedia dell' Arte, refers back, as Lipchitz admitted, to Watteau's painting of Gilles, above right in a cut-out, standing alone on an earthen stage. Gilles is one of the Louvre's great masterpieces and a work widely understood to be a self-representation of the artist as a Pierrot. More recently Picasso, Juan Gris and other painters had made the characters in the Commedia dell' Arte a common feature of Cubism as well. What, then, has Lipchitz done?
In making a sculpture of Pierrot in the simplified planes of Cubism, with hands on hips, Lipchitz has succeeded in expressing Pierrot's aura of loneliness, a feeling that pervades Watteau's original. It is the head of Lipchitz' Pierrot that is so winning in my book. Watteau's earlier version wears a halo-like hat to suggest ever so subtly that the inward-thinking artist at the moment of conception is saintly and thus divine; Lipchitz has, in turn, morphed the two cross-secting planes of Pierrot's head into a Cross. It is a brilliant poetic move. The Jewish Lipchitz conveys the idea that the artist's search for self-knowledge can make him Christ-like or, more specifically, that inside the artist's head lives Christ. We can all become Christ-like, even Jews and Moslems, for the Inner Tradition which so many great artists have followed does not discriminate between religions because, in their origins, all spiritual paths aim for the same goal, to reveal each human being as divine. That was the manifesto of Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino in the Italian Renaissance when spiritual people had enormous respect for other traditions.1 Those following the Inner Tradition more recently, as Lipchitz clearly did, still do.
1. Spiritual people in the Renaissance mistakenly believed that the origin of all religions was that of the ancient Egyptians. The error occurred because someone mis-dated an important mystical text that was no less accurate for being mis-dated though it has led more recent scholars to discredit what they should instead study.
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