"A Little Song"

A proud new purchase was unveiled last week by Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. It was titled Benediction, stood seven feet high, was cast in bronze.

From knob head to lion feet, Benediction's brutal, bulbous charms were probably lost on the average layman. Most frequent questions by museumgoers: "Is it harping or scratching?" "Why has it got three legs?" If its sculptor, 54-year-old Jacques Lipchitz, had been there to explain, he would have told them that what looks like a third leg is really a simplified drapery.

A stocky, intense French citizen, Jacques Lipchitz has been turning out weird, passionate work for 33 years. He is one of the world's most highly praised and least understood sculptors. He made the sketches for Benediction along the road from fallen Paris, in the midst of a wild, tragic rout. His idea was to make a statue of the harpist when & if he succeeded in reaching the U.S.

He began to be an artist in Druskiensiki, Lithuania, when he was only eight. His earliest works were carefully painted white in imitation of the plaster casts he saw at school. At 18, Lipchitz hotfooted to Paris, became the youngest member of the Cubist group, quickly developed the muscular, semi-abstract style.

Every Sunday Lipchitz takes a walk round & about Manhattan ("It is when I get nature"). Weekdays he gets up at 6 a.m., works furiously in his Manhattan studio until dark. Says he: "I am only interested in sculpture." New York, he says, is the place for him. "It is so exciting. Everything is set up for work."

For those who see little connection between his Benediction and its title, Lipchitz simply recalls the day on the road south from Paris when he made his first sketch of the harpist: "I was very mad, very anxious. This [sculpture] was a little song for Paris what I had to sing. It is like somebody goes to sleep. But sleep would bring cauchemar [nightmare], so I sing him a song that everything will come out all right. Maybe it is something that will make me feel better too."

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