Bather

Formally trained in classical and Renaissance art at the École de Beaux-Arts, Lipchitz was intrigued by the simplicity and candor of ancient Egyptian and Greek sculptures he encountered in Paris. Likening the multiple viewpoints simultaneously embedded in ancient works to the Cubist approach to art, Lipchitz began aligning with the movement in 1913. Rather than later decorative Cubist works, Lipchitz was influenced by the earlier, what he called “soberer” examples of the Cubism that Picasso and Braque practiced before 1914 (H.H. Arnason and J. Lipchitz, op. cit., p. 25). These earlier works revealed more possibilities for Lipchitz to develop into sculpture and aligned more closely with the crude multidimensionality he saw in ancient Egyptian and Greek statues.
During his period of Analytical Cubism between 1913 and 1923, the artist’s practice grew in the company of Juan Gris, and he was also known to admire the works of Alexander Archipenko and Umberto Boccioni. Bather, conceived in 1915, is one of the first sculptures the artist designed at the maturity of his Analytical Cubist phase. The same year he conceived the Bather, he destroyed most of his preliminary models during a period of emotional turmoil (ibid.).
When modeling his sculptures, Lipchitz said that “the idea grows under his fingers in three dimensions as the final sculpture appear[ed]” (ibid., p. 24). Rather than making a preliminary drawing, the artist modeled in clay since, by using clay as a medium, he could realize the final form during the modeling process.