Working Model for Government of the People

From 1962 until his death in 1973 Lipchitz produced a number of monumental public sculptures in the United States and Israel. Among these was Government of the People, a work commissioned by the city of Philadelphia in 1967 for the plaza outside the Municipal Services Building, opposite City Hall. As was his usual process, Lipchitz developed the sculpture's design through a number of plaster sketches, two of which were cast in bronze. In the first of these two bronze studies, the tower of interlocking bodies-whose form Lipchitz described as "a sort of totem pole"-culminates in the flag of Philadelphia. In the second, Working Model for the Government of the People (cast in an edition of seven, of which the work in the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum collection is one), the flag has metamorphized into a cluster of reclining figures. These figures are retained in the final version of the sculpture, for which the artist completed a full-scale plaster model before his death in 1973. The casting, assembly, and installation took place posthumously in 1976, under the supervision of Lipchitz's widow.