The Lithuanian-born sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (1891-1973) is usually associated with Picasso, Modigliani and the early twentieth-century Parisian avant-garde, but his artistic career had several later phases. Filmed in northern Italy at work on public commissions in the early 1970s, he describes his latest projects as the most exciting of all. The making of these three massive sculptures - the Tree of Life for Jerusalem, the Government of the People for the city of Philadelphia and the Classically inspired Bellerophon Taming Pegasus for Cornell University - involves numerous assistants and technicians. As the film follows the production process, Lipchitz is particularly eloquent about collaborative aspects of artistic creation, later seen also in his experiments with lithography. Drawing an analogy with his father's work as a builder, he defines his art not as making abstractions out of living materials but as giving life and warmth to abstract forms. Through Lipchitz's own commentary, the development of modern art as a whole is taken out of the purely academic arena and imbued with a profound sense of the life-long search for freedom of expression underlying the physical making of sculpture.