All my life as an artist I have asked myself: What pushes me continually to make sculpture? I have found the answer — at least the answer for myself.… - Jacques Lipchitz

Imagination is a very precise thing, you know — it is not fantasy. Remember, the other day I gave you the example of what I mean, what the difference between fantasy and imagination is. I gave you the example of the man who invented the of the man who invented the wheel while he was observing another man walking.

By the early 1920s I knew that I needed to move beyond the simple cubist vocabulary I had learned and to find a new content, a new personal expression.Abstraction was never enough for me.

The period during the First World War was a very exciting time in Paris, with artists, philosophers, and poets continually discussing and arguing about the work with which they were involved. Although I myself am little concerned with abstract theory, I certainly do think of cubism as a form of emancipation essentially different from artistic movements that had preceded it. Thus, impressionism, while it was a revolutionary technique, was still an essentially naturalistic movement concerned with a precise examination of the nature of light and the effect of changing lights on representational scenes and objects. Cubism did add a new dimension to painting and sculpture, a dimension that changed our way of looking at nature and the work of art.