Fig. 1 Jacques Lipchitz, Marin à la guitare, 1914, sold Replica Shoes 's, New York, 7 November 2007, lot 25 for $2,057,000 © Estate of Jacques Lipchitz

The present work is one of Lipchitz's best known Cubist sculptures, created at the end of World War I. Several years before, in the summer of 1914, Lipchitz traveled to Spain with Diego Rivera and other friends and, caught by the outbreak of the war, stayed there for six months, only returning to Paris at the end of the year. The subject of the present work was inspired by a scene he witnessed while on Mallorca of a young sailor dancing around a pretty girl and playing the guitar. According to Lipchitz: “The sailor had been sent by the government to observe the local fisherman who were smuggling tobacco. One of the artists had brought a very beautiful model, so they put her near the sailor and he began to dance around her all the t.mes , playing his guitar instead of watching the fishermen” (quoted in Exh. Cat., Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Jacques Lipchitz. A Life in Sculpture, 1989, p. 68). He made several drawings of this subject, and executed his first version of the theme in 1914 (see fig. 1), returning to it in 1917 for the creation of the present sculpture. This sailor appears to have made an impression not only on Lipchitz but also on his traveling companion Diego Rivera, who pictures a similar figure at lunch in a 1914 oil, the same year he painted his friend Lipchitz while they were still in Paris (see figs. 2 and 3).

Left: Fig. 2 Diego Rivera, Marinho almorzando (Sailor at Lunch), 1914, Museo Casa Diego Rivera © 2024 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums
Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Right: Fig. 3 Diego Rivera, Young Man in a Gray Sweater (Jacques Lipchitz), 1914, The Museum of Modern Art, New York © 2024 Banco de México Diego Rivera Frida Kahlo Museums
Trust, Mexico, D.F. / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

A.M. Hammacher further described the origins of this work: "In 1914 Lipchitz made toreador figures, dancers and the important Sailor with Guitar. This last was the result of his watching with amusement and fascination a sailor with a guitar dancing around an attractive girl. Years later he could still remember the sailor's trousers rolled up above his knee and his cap at a jaunty angle, details from a reality that passes over into the unreality of a spatial image, in which memories disappear, anatomy no longer exists and curves, straight lines and taut planes exert a mutual influence on each other and form a totally new organism. The guitar has become a center, a nodal point of forms, which meet each other there and which together determine the total play of light and shadow on a free, rhythmic basis" (Exh. Cat., Otterlo, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Lipchitz in Otterlo, 1977, n.p.).

The change in form from the first Marin à la guitare, which is imbued with more of an art-nouveau effect to that of the present sculpture is notable. According to Douglas Cooper, the growing development of Cubism in Lipchitz's work was a direct result not only of his friendship with Rivera and Picasso, both beginning in 1914, but also that of Juan Gris from 1915 onward. “Lipchitz’s work reflects a different approach to Cubist sculpture. That is to say, he made his subjects—bathers, sailors, a pierrot playing a clarinet, men playing guitars—less abstract and more legible… while emphasizing their mass” (Douglas Cooper, The Cubist Epoch, London, 1994, pp. 250-52).

Fig. 4 Georges Braque, Femme à la guitare, 1913, Centre Pompidou, Paris © Estate of Jacques Lipchitz
Fig. 5 Jacques Lipchitz, Marin à la guitare, 1917, Centre Pompidou, Paris © Estate of Jacques Lipchitz

Images of mandolin or guitar players figured largely in Lipchitz’s production during and after the First World War. The subject was not uncommon among the Cubists, but Lipchitz was one of the few artists to render this figure as a man (see fig. 4). The gender choice is important to note, as the abstraction of the male body was a rare subject for artists of this era. Lipchitz, however, fully explored the aesthetic potential of the masculine form, using broad, angular forms and sharp angles to render the powerful body.

Fig. 6 Le Corbusier, Pavillon de l'Esprit Nouveau, 1925, interior of living room with Lipchitz's stone Marin à la guitare on the balcony

Lipchitz first rendered this figure in a stone version in 1917; that sculpture is now in the collects ion of the Centre Pompidou in Paris (see figs. 5 and 6). The stone version was first owned by the artist Le Corbusier. Lipchitz and Le Corbusier worked together closely during this t.mes . In 1923 the sculptor commissioned Le Corbusier to build him a home on the outskirts of Paris which combined both studio space and living quarters. In the 1940s, not long after moving to New York, Lipchitz had Marin à la guitare cast in bronze by the Modern Art Foundry in Long Island City in an edition of 7; other casts from this edition is in the collects ion of the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.