By 1919, when Lipchitz conceived of the present work, he had developed an attuned sense of spatial composition influenced by his study of the Cubist works of Picasso, Braque and Gris. The artist was now able to effectively translate his two-dimensional conceptions into a three-dimensional form. Lipchitz viewed Cubism less as a movement as a new way to view the universe, and considered himself a Cubist from his first sculpture of that type in 1913 to the end of his career, well past the textbook definition of the movement.

The present cast was previously owned by American philanthropist and collects or Morton D. May of Saint Louis. May amassed one of the largest collects ions of Cubism and German Expressionist art in America and donated over one thousand works from his collects ion to various institutions (fig. 2).

Lipchitz invoked the art historical tradition of commedia dell'arte in a series of standing musicians in 1919 which articulated his new sculptural vocabulary in the treatment of a conventional subject: "One of the first sculptures made in 1919 was the Arlequin à l'accordéon. It reflects my interest in eighteenth century paintings, particularly that of Watteau... The Pierrots and harlequins were part of our general vocabulary, characters taken from the Commedia dell'arte, particularly popular in the eighteenth century. We may have been attracted to them originally because of their gay traditional cost.mes s, involving many different colored areas" (Jacques Lipchitz, My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, p. 58).

The artist’s turn to the stock characters of commedia dell'arte reflected the trends of the early avant-garde in Paris. Cézanne turned to the Pierrot in his work of the late 1880s and the Harlequin and Pierrot feature in masterworks from Picasso’s Blue Period up through his large-scale paintings from the 1960s. These artists all admitted a debt to Jean-Antoine Watteau, whose painting of Pierrot holds a prominent position in the collects ion of the Musée du Louvre in Paris (fig. 4 and 5).

The interpretation that Lipchitz offers us here captures the litheness of the figure, as well as his playful naïvete. Pierrot was often depicted as a figure lost in love, usually performing to draw the attention of Columbine. Though the composition here is clearly abstract, Lipchitz includes important elements such as the figure's collar and ruffled top, and the soundholes of the clarinet, that allow the viewer to reconstruct the subject. These important visual cues incite the playful game of symbols and recognition that fueled the cubist project and revolutionized the formal tenets of representation in art of the twentieth century.

Lipchitz became a French citizen in the mid 1920s, but the onset of World War II forced him to flee to the United States where he settled in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. After the war he was able to retrieve his original plasters from his studio in Paris and worked in concert with the Modern Art Foundry towards completing bronze editions for his early Cubist works. Many of these sculptures had one or two casts made in France before the war; with only a few exceptions, none had their complete edition of seven cast prior to Lipchitz's move to New York. Lipchitz had taken a strong view on edition sizes relatively early in his career—all works were to be cast in editions of no more than seven. According to the records of the Modern Art Foundry, seven examples of Pierrot au clarinet were cast between 1951 and 1957.