Bellerophon taming pegasus jacques lipchitz biography

Jacques Lipchitz spent his formative years in Paris studying sculpture and developing his oeuvre in the company of the foremost Cubist painters, including Juan Gris and Pablo Picasso.

By 1930, he began to introduce more overt themes and human content into his work, bringing to an end what he called his “Olympian period” of formal exploration with hermetic content.

Sharp contours, smooth surfaces, and geometric patterns gave way to naturalistic or expressively distorted anatomies, strongly modeled surfaces, and irregular contours. Tragic, violent, and ecstatic themes in subjects of mythological or religious origin predominated. 

Birth of the Muses, grew out of a series of small sketches from 1944 responding to the myth of Pegasus, in which a winged horse alights on Mount Olympus.

Where its four hooves touch the ground, four springs of water emerge, out of which the muses are born. In its allusion to the birth of inspiration, the story also rela