Selected Commentary
“Peter Lipman-Wulf, the refugee German sculptor, owes to Hitler his best schooling – 10 years of artistic achievement in France. He has proved his creative ability in wood, in ceramic, in bronze and in stone. His portrait busts (like that of Pablo Casals) are not merely striking outward resemblances, but also profound studies of the character of each subject.”
Emil Ludwig in “Freies Volk”
Bern, Switzerland, June 21, 1947
“Your Faust illustrations have interested me a great deal … the witches Sabbath drawings are very powerful … young Goethe would in all likelihood have appreciated and acknowledged them. With gratitude, Your devoted (signed) Thomas Mann.”
Letter from Thomas Mann to Peter Lipman-Wulf
December 14, 1946
“… but down among the weeds were many fresh, playful sprouts … Peter Lipman-Wulf’s Horse and Man looked as if it had been made for fun from the contents of a carpenter’s barrel. Despite its casual air, it was tense and as lightly constructed as anything in the show.”
Time Magazine, “Signs of Spring: Whitney Annual” April 17, 1950
“What strikes me the most strongly when looking at these sculptures is the struggle between the two tendencies of our times, the abstract and the figurative, which runs through his work as leitmotiv … it is in the works of such artists as Peter Lipman-Wulf that this conflict is brought out into the open with stupefying candor.”
Hans Sahl in German-American Review, February-March, 1958.
“We have just received the stunning Joseph and his Brothers with text and engravings by Peter Lipman-Wulf for the permanent collection of Syracuse University. It is an important donation.
“Mr. Peter Lipman-Wulf is a great artist and his work reflects his unique talent, combining philosophical and literary ideas with artistic imagination and technical proficiency of the highest quality.”
Letter from Professor Lawrence Schmeckebier, Dean, School of Art, Syracuse University to Paul and Marianne Gourary on December 21, 1966
“Lipman-Wulf’s ceramics have an individuality besides great imagination that makes them particularly attractive to this viewer and in many instances finer that those of dear Picasso.”
Jeanne Paris, Long Island Press, June 21, 1970
“The German-born, Berlin-trained artist combines both European and American elements in his work … Lipman-Wulf’s works of the ‘50s has an aggressive, even brutal, power. Torn shapes evoke an elemental sense of drama.”
Malcolm Preston, Newsday, September 1975
“For Peter Lipman-Wulf, the pre-eminent concerns are human suffering and human love. In his drawings and graphic work, he has achieved a balance between the two.”
Faith Paulette Dreher,
Curator, Widener College Museum, Chester, Pennsylvania, March 1979
“Peter Lipman-Wulf is primarily a sculptor, and thinks in terms of three-dimensional space and design; space, and form’s interaction with space, are his most emphatic concerns technically. The viewer will marvel at the catholicity of emotional moods of Lipman-Wulf’s religious iconography. Having lived through the horrors of world wars and much personal suffering, Peter Lipman-Wulf has grown and grown as a person and as an artist, so that he is creating more and more affirmative images in his old age, much the way Verdi did with Falstaff, or Thomas Mann did with Felix Krull.”
R. Daniel Evans, Exhibition Catalogue,
Widener College Museum, 1980.
“David Playing the Harp – a large, imposing piece, is almost totemic in its stark, roughly hewn and abstracted components. This aggressive, yet sensitive and suggestive, employment of wood is one of the artist’s outstanding achievements.”
Helen Harrison,
The New York Times, August 5, 1979
“Unlike those artists who strive for the faithful simulations of natural form, Peter Lipman-Wulf seeks to express the inner forces that motivate and amplify human existence. Except to a necessary extent in portraiture, his sculpture does not deal with outward appearance, but rather makes tangible the underlying energies of creative life.
“Nowhere is this essentially expressionistic preoccupation more evident than in Lipman-Wulf’s sculptures on the themes of music, dance and love. It is through these works that we may trace his development, growth and progress from his student days in Berlin, through his career in Europe and emigration to the United States, as far as his most recent pieces.”
Peter Lipman-Wulf: An Appreciation
Helen Harrison,
Guest Curator, Queens Museum, NY, February, 1980