Footnotes

• Provenance
  Marlborough Godard Gallery, Toronto.
  Private Collection, Canada (acquired from the above in 1975).
  
  Literature
  B. Van Bork, Jacques Lipchitz, The Artist at Work, New York, 1966, p. 157 (terracotta version illustrated).
  H.H. Arnason, Jacques Lipchitz, Sketches in Bronze, London, 1969, p. 14 (another cast illustrated, p. 58, pl. 24).
  A.G. Wilkinson, The Sculpture of Jacques Lipchitz, A Catalogue Raisonné, The Paris Years, 1910-1940, New York, 1996, vol. I, p. 77, no. 203 (another cast illustrated).
  
  Pierre Levai has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.
  
  'During the summer of 1926 I was at Ploumanach, a resort on the Brittany coast. There I was intrigued by certain natural formations of rocks in the water off the shore. A series of tremendous stones was suspended on other stones which had been largely washed away by the waves. The large stones were thus held in a delicate equilibrium. When a wind was blowing, they moved and swayed.' (J. Lipchitz with H.H. Arnason, My Life in Sculpture, New York, 1972, p. 89).
  
  This experience of the dramatic Breton cliffs, known as the 'Pink Granite Coast', inspired Lipchitz to evolve three compositions, of which the present work is the first, which play with monumental rock-like forms. The resulting sculptures have a marked frontality which is reminiscent of Primitive Art, and lead to the full-size sculpture Figure now in the Museum of Modern Art, New York. As Lipchitz noted: 'This was the genesis of the great Figure, 1926-30, a work that summarized many of my ideas dating back to 1915. Specifically, it pulled together those different directions of massive, material frontality and of aerial openness in which I had been working during the 1920s. It is also very clearly a subject sculpture, an image with a specific and rather frightening personality. Although the Figure has been associated with African sculpture and the resemblance is apparent, it is now evident to me that it emerged, step by step, from findings I made in my cubist and postcubist sculpture over the previous fifteen years." (J. Lipchitz with H.H. Arnason, op. cit., p. 90).
  
  Casts of the present sculpture are in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.