Bust of Marsden Hartley

Jacques Lipchitz, who had fled war-torn Paris and emigrated to America in 1941, met the modernist painter Marsden Hartley in 1942. He recalled his eagerness to do a portrait of Hartley, whose face he considered "typically American" and "very sensitive." This penetrating portrayal was done the year before Hartley's death at sixty-six and poignantly captures the painter's age and melancholy. The monumentality of the profile is in marked contrast to the wasted and drawn features of the frontal view, with its tragic overtones. Lipchitz commented that this brooding likeness of a fellow artist had been "made for myself as an exercise and demonstration." In fact, it required twenty-seven life sittings to complete Hartley's portrait. This cast, one of seven, belonged to the collectors Edith and Milton Lowenthal, who also left the Museum a rich legacy of nine paintings by Marsden Hartley.