Works
Biography
Maquette for Loom, 1965
Born in New York City, Seymour Lipton became one of the modern-art innovators for direct metal sculpture, breaking away from the traditional methods of creating bronze sculpture from complex casting processes. With Abstract Expressionist style, he created a method of working in sheet metal brazed with bronze or nickel silver, flexible but solid looking material that allowed him freely to cut and weld basic shapes. A rust-proof alloy, it was called Monel.
His themes, many of them having to do with bird subjects of flight and confinement and those issues relative to the American working class, paralleled the Abstract Expressionist movement in American painting. Of this themes, he said: ""For me, experiences of movement, flight, strength, space, air, tensions, etc. . . . Basically 'man' concerns me in all the various things I make. I find 'inner spaces' of man in things outside of himself." He was closely linked socially and intellectually to the 1940s and 1950s artists in New York including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb.
Lipton earned a degree from Columbia University in 1927 intending to be a dentist, but turned to sculpture in 1932. However, the early part of his career was supported by his dentistry. He taught sculpture, especially direct-metal techniques, at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1938 to 1964, and in 1967, he became Fine Arts commissioner of New York.
His themes, many of them having to do with bird subjects of flight and confinement and those issues relative to the American working class, paralleled the Abstract Expressionist movement in American painting. Of this themes, he said: ""For me, experiences of movement, flight, strength, space, air, tensions, etc. . . . Basically 'man' concerns me in all the various things I make. I find 'inner spaces' of man in things outside of himself." He was closely linked socially and intellectually to the 1940s and 1950s artists in New York including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Adolph Gottlieb.
Lipton earned a degree from Columbia University in 1927 intending to be a dentist, but turned to sculpture in 1932. However, the early part of his career was supported by his dentistry. He taught sculpture, especially direct-metal techniques, at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1938 to 1964, and in 1967, he became Fine Arts commissioner of New York.
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