Gaston Lachaise

Background

Gaston Lachaise was born at Paris, France, the son of Jean Lachaise and Marie Barré. His mother was of Alsatian family, his father was an Auvergnat cabinetmaker.

Education

Gaston, a skilled craftsman's son, was sent to the École Bernard Palissy, a thorough training-school for the crafts and art trades. The desire to be a genuine artist, however, prompted his leaving the Palissy for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts a year before graduation. Here his atelier was that of the classicist Gabriel Jules Thomas, under whom he was a good student from 1898 to 1904 or 1905.

Career

It was important for his style and career that he had one of the best technical groundings among sculptors of his generation, a generation that inherited and commonly exaggerated the Rodinesque habit of working only in clay and leaving everything else to the mercies of professional stone-cutters, specializing foundries, or "ecclesiastical" wood-carvers. Even Lachaise in his mature years was not altogether free from the faults of this division of labor, brought about by the supposed superiority of the artist to the artisan; but more than most of his contemporaries he was sensitive to materials and attentive to the refining and finishing of his work.

After his studies Lachaise felt less and less interest in the anecdotal or erotic subjects of current practice, and more and more a spiritual kinship with prehistoric art, with the great Oriental sculptor-architects, with all such "primitives" as are so by reason of being uninhibited rather than merely unskilled. At the time he did nothing about it but look and read. He shared much of the conventionally unconventional vie de Boheme, but from this he was snatched by his meeting with Isabel (Dutaud) Nagle, the American who eventually became his wife.

Feeling an urge to get to America, he entered the shop of René Lalique, maker of luxury glassware and one of the forwarders of Art Nouveau. There he worked long enough to earn his passage money and thirty dollars to spare. Arriving in Boston early in 1906, he fell into an assistant's post with Henry H. Kitson, for whose commissioned memorials he satisfactorily executed military accoutrements and decorative relief patterns. For such work he was well prepared, but he was privily critical of the taxidermic facility of his employer and the other studio assistants. And he was slowly realizing himself. He felt that his Americanization began when in the spring and summer of 1906 he swam in Dorchester Bay, becoming an excellent swimmer, and taking on a more aggressive personality.

His real career began in 1912, when he moved to New York and started the "Standing Woman" (Whitney Museum) which was not complete in bronze until 1927. In 1913 he first showed his own work (in the Armory show); but needing the income from steady employment, he became Paul Manship's assistant, continuing for seven or eight years. His one-man exhibition which was to have been given in the galleries of Bourgeois in 1916 had to be postponed until 1918, but there was another in 1920; in 1927 and 1928 respectively Stieglitz and Joseph Brummer gave him shows in their galleries. C. W. Kraushaar was also generous as dealer and patron, and there were architectural commissions.

The retrospective show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1935 was accidentally more fully definitive than it might have been if Lachaise had not died suddenly in that year. The distinguishing feature of his work was maturity. In a field whose subject matter is almost exclusively the human body and whose patrons and practitioners for many decades had preferred adolescent forms of that subject, Lachaise's robust, earthy, exaggerated anatomies were startling. Although he was always admired within the profession for his craftsmanship, there were complaints from profession and laity alike over the massive but poised, overtly sexual, physically proud personages that he created.

Except in portraits he passed beyond naturalism to an investiture of the human frame (which he perfectly understood) with a superb but almost gross, yet also godlike and symbolic, sort of flesh. When he returned to an earlier motive, the later version was always more nearly abstract--not non-representational but geometrically simplified: the parts became fewer and larger in relation to the whole, the transitions between them were reduced to marked boundaries, and the scale was thus increased without increasing dimensions. His voluptuousness was not sly, but candid and opulent as of right. His swooping, confident line drawings form an almost independent but kindred category.

Lachaise's person in middle age was stocky but resilient; outside the studio he was correct in the French manner with black tie and black hat. He always had a strong accent, but in other respects he was plainly American. In 1916 he had become a naturalized citizen. His handwriting was one of the most extraordinary and impressive of hands. His uncompromising attitude as artist and the fact that sculpture is the most costly profession to practise combined to keep him constantly in difficulties with creditors and patrons, difficulties which made him seem more mercurial than he was. Actually he concentrated so fiercely on his life and work with his wife and on observing other active life around him that he had no time for inconsistency.

Achievements

• Lachaise played a critical role in the birth of American Modernism. He was most recognized for his female nudes such as Standing Woman. He helped redefine the female nude in a new and powerful manner and his drawings also reflected his new style of the female form. Lachaise was also famouse as a brilliant portraitist. He executed busts of notable artists and celebrities, such as John Marin, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Gaston Lachaise: Twenty sculptures.

    (Catalog of auction held by Robert Schoelkopf Gallery Febr...)

  • The sculpture of Gaston Lachaise

    (The sculpture of Gaston Lachaise paperback Lachaise, Gast...)

  • Gaston Lachaise: Retrospective exhibition-- January 30- March 7, 1935
  • Gaston Lachaise Portrait Sculpture
  • Gaston Lachaise: The Monumental Sculpture
  • Gaston Lachaise: A 50th Anniversary Exhibition
  • American Art Review: March-April 1975
  • Ano Woman: The Art of Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935

Connections

Lachaise was married to Isabel Dutaud Nagle.

Father:

Jean Lachaise

Mother:

Marie Barré

Spouse:

Isabel Dutaud Nagle

References

• Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work
• Gaston Lachaise: Portrait Sculpture
• Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935: Sculpture and Drawings
• Lachaise: An Important New Study of a Controversal Mordern Sculptor
• Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935