Mythmaker in Bronze

No one knows what the man who founded Duluth, Minn., in 1679 looked like. Archives reveal little more than that he was a French voyageur named Daniel Greysolon, bore the title of Sieur Du Luth, served as foot captain in the Royal Guard, and became a friend of the Sioux Indians. To give him more substance, Sculptor Jacques Lipchitz, 74, was asked to make a bronze of Du Luth. "Find a younger man," advised the sculptor.

Tortured Totems. They couldn't--at least not to their liking. A year later, the committee returned to Lipchitz. This time they persuaded him to take on the challenge. Lipchitz decided: "He will have the look of a builder." To costume Du Luth, Lipchitz picked up clues wherever he could, garbed his figure in an Indian jacket, and placed a plumed hat atop his long curled peruke (two such wigs are known to have belonged to Du Luth). The result, conceived as a mythical hero (see opposite page), will be unveiled this week on the Duluth campus of the University of Minnesota. Possessing both the dignity of a daydream Rodin and the robust romance of a Disneyesque giant, it is an unconventional monument by the unconventional Lipchitz.

In a sense, there never was a conventional Lipchitz. The youngest of the cubists at 24, he is half a century later one of the elders of modern art. With Picasso 84 and Chagall 78, Lipchitz is the third in a line of living patriarchs who led the 20th century artistic transformation. As an eight-year-old youngster in Lithuania, Lipchitz made clay toys to give girls, says he, "so they would be nice to me. You see, I started sculpting for love." The dolls of his youth have ripened into shattered torsos, tortured totems, writhing beasts.

Lumpy Energy. In his suburban New York studio in Hastings, overlooking the Hudson River, Lipchitz kneads and molds the clay that retains a motile suppleness even when translated into hard bronze. The angular surfaces of his earlier cubism have filled out in a joyful exploding into space. He works every day but Saturday, rising at 6 a.m. to put on the traditional phylacteries for his prayers. "I start my sculpture with a prayer," he says. "My belief is like a child's, but I don't keep kosher or attend synagogue."

Presently, Lipchitz is working on a 40-ft. sculpture to stand above the entrance to Columbia University's law school. To symbolize law and order, he chose the classical theme of Bellerophon grappling with the winged Pegasus to exemplify man taming the wild forces of nature. In their lumpy energy, the forms spew from the pedestal, masses stretching ever wider and spreading out into giant wings. As in the Duluth statue, Lipchitz is pursuing an ancient myth in his uniquely modern manner.

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