One of the artist’s most striking forms, Jacques Lipchitz’ La Rencontre is a pivotal example of his early proto-Cubist masterworks. Having moved to Paris from Lithuania in 1909, Lipchitz began taking classes at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian and soon befriended Picasso, Gris, Braque and Rivera. Amid such avant-garde circles, Lipchitz was at the center of artistic dialogue around the bourgeoning Cubist movement.

Compared to his Femme et gazelles of 1911-12, which echoes the classical lines of Bourdelle and Maillol’s works, Lipchitz’ La Rencontre asserts an emphatic sense of modernism in its sleek geometricized forms. Reflecting on this momentous period, the artist later stated: “It was natural that we should have been interested in machines, not only because we were seeking in our paintings and sculpture something of the claritys and precision of machine forms but because this was a moment in history when the machine loomed very large in our consciousness” (quoted in “Jacques Lipchitz: His Life in Sculpture” in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 30, no. 6, New York, 1972, p. 285).

Lipchitz was one of the most successful of all his contemporaries at interpreting the Cubist aesthetic through sculpture. The works that he created between 1910 and 1915 wrestled with the issues of deconstructing form using a medium that was inherently solid. His figures of this era, with their geometricized bodies twisting and turning in space, exemplify the complexity of his task.

Alan Wilkinson explains that Lipchitz's individualized approach to his art was influenced by a trip to Russia in 1912, where he was impressed by the curvilinear shapes and exaggerated, zoomorphic figuration in Scythian metalwork (see fig. 1). Wilkinson writes, "We can see clearly that three factors were making themselves felt strongly and, if not simultaneously, at least almost simultaneously, at a rapidly accelerating pace. These factors were a tendency toward the curvilinear (in which the S-line and spiral manifest themselves); rectilinearity, in which the rectangle and diagonal are noteworthy; and third, the start of a fusion of forms leading up to an organic intertwining. It was a conflictual situation, in which his deep-rooted urge toward human figuration and fear of pure abstraction confronted him with the necessity of finding a solution in an art form in which anatomical structures had lost authority " (A. G. Wilkinson, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, A Catalogue Raisonné, Volume One, The Paris Years, 1910-1940, London & New York, 1996, pp. 10-11).

Pioneering the nascent movement with his artistic brethren, Lipchitz challenged the traditional notions of space and form. As he recounted later in his autobiography, “It was in 1913, the year that Rivera [see fig. 2] took me to Picasso’s studio, that I began to move seriously into what I would call my proto-cubist phase. Although these initial efforts in the direction of cubism were simplified geometric compositions rather than true cubism, I think it is of interest that I experimented both an angular geometry, as in The Encounter (The Meeting), 1913 and a more curvilinear, even baroque, manner, as in the Woman with Serpent... In making this group I was also consciously interested in the opening of up of the voids; I might also say that this is my first transparent sculpture” (quoted in J. Lipchitz & H.H. Arnason, My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, p. 11).

Much like Picasso’s work in the 1920s (see fig. 3) and later that of Alexander Calder, Lipchitz sought a sense of the permeable in his abstracted figuration. Creating a sense of symmetry and rhythm in the present work, Lipchitz balances the weight of the figures’ united torsos with a staggered open stance which in turn echoes in the small pocket of space between the two heads. This sort of ‘transparent sculpture,’ however, was overridden in the ensuing years with the solid geometric figures which by 1915 would come to define his mature Cubist style.

Like many of Lipchitz’ works, La Rencontre evolved out of a multifaceted study of form and figuration. After creating a number of drawings, the artist would then turn to what he considered his “sketches in clay.” These clay models were later translated into primary plasters, which would in turn be used for the bronze casts and stone iterations. Lipchitz was extremely protective of the casting process and only allowed for editions of seven casts to be created of each form, forbidding posthumous editions.

After the artist’s arrival in the United States in 1941, he implemented the practice of casting his thumbprint on his forms as further assurance of the authenticity. Other examples of La Rencontre belong to the collects ions of the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo and well as the Hakone Open-Air Museum in Japan. Belonging to the same family collects ion for the last 50 years, the present work is also the first bronze cast to appear at auction in more than two decades.