Seated Bather

By 1915, Lithuanian-born sculptor Jacques Lipchitz was fully invested in a Cubist approach to sculpture. Embracing Cubism's logic of analysis and abstraction, Lipchitz began to make sculptures that looked less and less like recognizable figures. However, after his radically reductive sculptures of 1915—figures that were fully geometrical, even architectural—this work marks a deliberate return to naturalism. Seated Bather is both anatomically recognizable and highly idealized, by means of the geometric curvilinear elements that Lipchitz associated with the expression of 'woman' as a concept. Lipchitz produced a series of sculpted bathers between 1916 and 1919, coinciding with a new phase in his thinking about modern sculpture as a language in three dimensions. The series of bathers allowed him to use a single motif to work through some of the formal problems of translating two-dimensional Cubism into three-dimensional sculpture.