Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:
Ruth S. and David M. Heyman, New York
Private collection, New York

Exhibited:
An Illustrated Catalogue of an Important Collection of Paintings, Marbles, Bronzes, C.W. Kraushaar Art Galleries, New York, January 15-February 16, 1924, illus.

Recorded:
Gallatin, A.E., editor. Gaston Lachaise: Sixteen Reproductions in Collotype of the Sculptor's Work, New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1924, p. 15, illus.

Regarded by many as the greatest American sculptor of his generation, Gaston Lachaise was born in Paris in 1882. He was the son of a master cabinetmaker, and he quickly proved himself an artistic prodigy, using his father’s woodworking tools to create his first carvings. His formal studies in art began at the age of thirteen at the École Bernard Palissy. He continued his study at the Académie Nationale des Beaux-Arts. He met with great success at both institutions, and in 1899, despite rules of age restriction, a Lachaise work was accepted into the Salon des Artistes Français. The artist continued to exhibit at the Salon for the next five years.

In 1903 Lachaise met and fell in love with Isabel Dutaud Nagle, a visiting French Canadian ten years his senior. Although she was married and had a son, Nagle eventually became the great muse of Lachaise’s career; the artist used her as his model and inspiration for the rest of his life.

In pursuit of Nagle, Lachaise immigrated to the Boston in 1906 and worked in the studio of Henry Hudson Kitson. An artist of capacious energy, Lachaise worked on his own sculpture during his off hours, modeling tiny clay works inspired by Nagle. Lachaise moved to New York in 1912 and was included in the 1913 Armory Show; he showed one of the small clay sculptures of Nagle, entitled Nude with a Coat. That same year he became the main studio assistant to the acclaimed sculptor Paul Manship, with whom he worked for six years. As in Boston, he continued the development of his own work when not in Manship’s studio.

In 1918 Lachaise showed 29 works in his first one-man exhibition at the Stephan Bourgeois Galleries, including his famed life-sized nude sculpture of Isabel Nagle, Elevation. Elevation was a seminal work for Lachaise, here he created a portrait of a woman gracefully standing on tiptoe, her long legs and arched feet supporting a very large and curvaceous torso. The lines of the figure are clean, sensual and pared down; they serve to balance the mass of the work. The sculpture occupies a large amount of space, yet nothing feels unnecessary. It is a work of great power and assuredness.

Although feverishly pursuing his work and doting on Isabel (they were married in 1917), Lachaise had an active social life. He and his wife often visited the salon of the Stettheimer sisters, and they counted among their friends the artists of the Stieglitz circle (Marsden Hartley, John Marin and Georgia O’Keeffe) as well as John Sloan, and the poets Hart Crane and e e cummings. But his work was fully his own: developed out of his own deep feelings and a challenge to the honesty and prudishness of the art world.

Dolphins displays many of the characteristics of Lachaise’s best work: the streamlined forms of the dolphins, tapered at both ends, recall the elegant simplicity of form for which the artist is renowned. The dolphins emerge from a circular bronze base, and with their backs gracefully arched, their curvilinear bodies gently torqued and their rear fins in varying positions, they convey a sense of seamless fluidity and sumptuous undulation. The subtlety of the artist’s sculpting is astonishing: the eye barely registers the central vertical wave that attaches the dolphins to the base as they appear to leap gracefully above their glass “water.” As in Elevation, there are no extraneous elements in Dolphins. Lachaise’s modeling reveals the assurance of a master; it conveys the essence of his subject with no need of additional ornamentation.