Lipton, Seymour (1903–1986). American sculptor, born in New York. He studied dental sugery at Columbia University, 1923–7, and was entirely self-taught as a sculptor; by 1932 he was seriously committed to art, but for many years after that he pursued a dual career (like
Ferber, another dentist-sculptor). Until the mid-1940s he carved in wood and stone, using violent distortions to reflect the social struggle and anguish of the years of the Depression and the Second World War. In about 1942, however, he took up metal casting and abandoned the human figure as a subject, instead using ‘skeletal forms, horns, pelvis … to convey the basic struggles in nature on a broader biological level'. By 1945 his work was completely abstract and he became part of a group ( Ferber,
Lassaw,
Roszak) whose work paralleled that of the Abstract Expressionist painters. His first one-man exhibition of metal sculpture was at the Betty
Parsons gallery in 1948. In the 1950s, as he searched for ‘a controlled organic dynamism', his violently expressive abstractions began to give way to more lyrical forms fashioned from curving shells of Monel (a nickel-copper alloy) welded together at the edges and covered with nickel-silver or bronze. Towards the end of the 1950s he once again introduced forms suggestive of the human figure, as in
Sentinel (Yale University Art Gallery, 1959). He had many major public commissions, including
Archangel (1964) for Philharmonic Hall, Lincoln Center, New York.
