Nasher Sculpture Center

After moving to Paris in 1909, Jacques Lipchitz became a key figure in that city's avant-garde artist community. Seated Woman, with its geometric forms and simplified anatomy, demonstrates Lipchitz's absorption of the Cubist principles of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, as well as lessons from African and Oceanic tribal art, so influential in Paris in the first decades of the 20th century. Alternating flat planes and rounded volumetric shapes, Lipchitz carved the seated figure and chair as a series of architectonic profiles that emerge only upon viewing the sculpture from all sides. A nearly abstract composition of opposing and interlocking shapes still describes a geometrically idealized figure, with a single piercing eye.