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Lot Essay
During the winter of 1916, Lipchitz agreed to a contract with Léonce Rosenberg. Rosenberg had previously dealt in ancient art, but during World War I moved to fill the void left when the French government declared the prominent modern art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler an enemy alien.
Primarily having worked in clay and bronze, it was also at this time that the artist began to explore the translation of his stone carvings into bronze. Lipchitz handled each cast from the edition with extreme care, "I have always been most careful to limit myself to my traditional seven casts and to identify them by putting my fingerprint into the actual wax model, which was then made permanent in a bronze" (quoted in J. Lipchitz and H.H. Arnason, op. cit., p. 45). Discussing the present work and his evolution of form, Lipchitz has written:
When I finished the Seated Bather, I realized and was excited by the significance of the new departure, the new syntax of forms. In the next work, Seated Bather [the present work], I attempted a more ambitious, and an even more complex, statement of the figure... Although this sculpture introduces curvilinear elements in the arm, the leg, the breast, and the drapery, it is in total somewhat more vertical and rectangular than the preceeding piece. The progress of my ideas has never been in a straight line. There was a continual search backward and forward, new findings combined with ideas which I may have explored years before but which I had dropped and then taken up again. (Quoted in ibid., pp. 45-46)
In addition to the bronze edition, there is a unique marble version in The Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York and a unique limestone version in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago.
Primarily having worked in clay and bronze, it was also at this time that the artist began to explore the translation of his stone carvings into bronze. Lipchitz handled each cast from the edition with extreme care, "I have always been most careful to limit myself to my traditional seven casts and to identify them by putting my fingerprint into the actual wax model, which was then made permanent in a bronze" (quoted in J. Lipchitz and H.H. Arnason, op. cit., p. 45). Discussing the present work and his evolution of form, Lipchitz has written:
When I finished the Seated Bather, I realized and was excited by the significance of the new departure, the new syntax of forms. In the next work, Seated Bather [the present work], I attempted a more ambitious, and an even more complex, statement of the figure... Although this sculpture introduces curvilinear elements in the arm, the leg, the breast, and the drapery, it is in total somewhat more vertical and rectangular than the preceeding piece. The progress of my ideas has never been in a straight line. There was a continual search backward and forward, new findings combined with ideas which I may have explored years before but which I had dropped and then taken up again. (Quoted in ibid., pp. 45-46)
In addition to the bronze edition, there is a unique marble version in The Metroplitan Museum of Art, New York and a unique limestone version in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago.