Jacob Lipkin: 14 cool facts

Jacob Lipkin (1909-1996), An American Sculptor

Jacob Lipkin, an American sculptor, was born April 19, 1909 in New York City’s Lower East Side. Lipkin carved in rock and wood subsequent to a humanist’s sensibility, often using “creatures and people from mythology to convey the harmonious membership between Man and Nature” (from a quote by Koren Der Harootian, in the Village Art Center Catalog, circa 1954).

Between 1937 and 1940, Lipkin studied art in Manhattan at the Educational alliance, The Cooper Union, Art Students League of New York and Leonardo da Vinci Art School. By 1940, Lipkin devoted himself adequately to sculpting. He worked and lived his last 40 years in the modest home, studio, and sculpture garden he had built himself in the Township of Babylon, N.Y.

Lipkin’s produce an effect was exhibited later artists including Chaim Gross, Louise Bourgeois, Louise Nevelson, and Isamu Noguchi in the 1940s to 1950s including at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Providence Art Club, New Jersey Society of Painters and showings at public museums including the Brooklyn Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In the 1950s Lipkin was an teacher at the North Shore Community College and join professor at Silvermine College.

Lipkin standard numerous awards including the New Jersey Society of Painters and Sculptors Medal of Honor in 1958 and First Prize in 1964 and Silvermine Guild Award.

He plus exhibited widely during the 1950s past a variety of artists. Over approximately four decades he participated in over 70 organization exhibitions and had 21 one-man shows.

In 1968 Lipkin had a 30-year retrospective in Philadelphia at the grand lobby of the Provident National Bank where he exhibited 40 sculptures. Lipkin’s Socrates, The Prophet, 1968, was originally installed by the Provident National Bank at JFK Plaza and now stands in Cret Park at Ben Franklin Parkway. This eight foot tall, 13,000-pound sculpture of Socrates stands in Philadelphia amid other well-known artists including Henry Moore, Jacob Epstein and Jacques Lipchitz.

Jacob Lipkin’s con resides in private and public collections and museums. His sculptures in museums tally the Head of a Pony, 1947, in grey granite at The Fogg Museum at Harvard; the Camel, 1947, in white marble, and the Ram, 1945, in sandstone and benefit at The Parrish Art Museum on Southampton, New York; the Ape, 1953, in the buildup of the Philadelphia Zoo;Head of the Prophet Isaiah 1952 at the Jewish Museum in New York City; the Pelican circa 1954 at the St. Lawrence University, Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, Canton, New York; and Bear Cub 1966 at the Smithsonian Institution, National Zoological Park, Washington, D.C.

Lipkin’s other feint residing at museums include The East River, N.Y.C. painting 1928 at the Luce Center of the New-York Historical Society;John Brown bas-relief at the Howard University Law Society in Washington, D.C.; and a sculpture at the Maritime Industry Museum, Fort Schuyler, N.Y.;

Phil Katzman independent filmmaker and belong to professor of radio, television, film at Hofstra University, documented Lipkin’s activity and produce a result in his film, From Stone: Jacob Lipkin, an American Sculptor, which aired on PBS in 1988.

Lipkin told Kermit Jaediker, a reporter at the New York Daily News in January 1960, “Life is funny. All my energy I have been banging away to get into the hall of fame. One day I fail to pay a bill, and fame sneaks in my back up door.” Jacob Lipkin died of cancer at the age of 87 years on April 27, 1996, in West Babylon, New York.