Jacques Lipchitz, French, 1891-1973

Woman Reading (Liseuse)
1919
Terracotta, stained
Purchased through the William B. Jaffe and Evelyn A. Jaffe Hall Fund; S.965.13

Lipchitz’s Woman Reading corresponds to a subject that he explored in a series of works cast in bronze in 1919 entitled The Reader. It followed his close collaboration and fertile exchanges with the Spanish cubist artist Juan Gris and the Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro (1893-1948), who lived together with their families outside Paris in the final years of World War I. Both Lipchitz and Gris assisted Huidobro in his poetic rendering of cubist themes, while at the same time incorporating literary references in some of their works of this period.