What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part III

We wish to thank Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming Catalogue Raisonné of Lachaise’s work (sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation), for her assistance in preparing the catalogue entry for the present work.

Provenance:

“The Friends of Richard Buhlig,” 1952.

A donation from the above.

Los Angeles Museum of History, Science and Art (now Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 1952–1986.

Property of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (deaccessioned for Acquisition Funds).

Sotheby’s Arcade, New York, sale of June 26, 1986, lot 219.

Acquired directly from the above sale.

Exhibition:

"Gaston Lachaise, 1882–1935, Sculpture and Drawings," Los Angeles County Museum of Art, December 3, 1963–April 5, 1964; traveled to Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, no. 80 (illustrated in the accompanying catalogue).

“Gaston Lachaise: 100th Anniversary Exhibition, Sculpture and Drawings,” Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, California, November 19–December 19, 1982, pp. 30, 34, 43, no. 48 (illustrated in accompanying catalogue).

“Gaston Lachaise, Portrait Sculpture,” National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., November 22, 1985–February 16, 1986, pp. 3, 10, 14, 16, 116, 117 (illustrated accompanying catalogue).

Literature:

"Profile of Gaston Lachaise" in Creative Art, vol. 3, no. 2 (August 1928), p. xxii, the portrait referenced.

“Further Acquisitions, 1952–1954,” in Bulletin of the Art Division of the Los Angeles County Museum, vol. 6, no. 3—Supplement, Summer 1954, p. 34, illustrated.

Gerald Nordland, “Gaston Lachaise” in Artforum, vol. 11, no. 7 (December 1963), p. 29, referenced.

Donald B. Goodall, "Gaston Lachaise, Sculptor." PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1969, vol. 1, p. 543n. 48 (3); vol. 2, p. 460, the plaster model and the present cast referenced.

Carolyn Kinder Carr and Margaret C.S. Christman, Gaston Lachaise Portrait Sculpture, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985, p. 117 (illustrated).

Lot Essay:

Gaston Lachaise’s fluently modeled Portrait of Richard Buhlig (1889–1952), a famous Chicago-born, Vienna-trained concert pianist, captures a sense of his sensitive subject’s living presence. Although Lachaise is generally known for his monumental sculptures of his ideal Woman, he also created many portraits of his contemporaries, perhaps most notably those of artists Georgia O’Keeffe (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City) and John Marin (Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut).

When creating a portrait, Lachaise typically modelled his sitter in Plastiline, a pliable, non-drying clay; then cast the Plastiline model in plaster; and afterward cast the plaster in bronze or used the model as an aid to carve the portrait in stone, such as alabaster or marble. It is not known who initiated Buhlig’s portrait—although Lachaise, a lifelong, passionate music lover, may have suggested it—or exactly when Buhlig sat for it. The Plastiline model was likely completed by early 1928, as Lachaise recorded in his Journal, p. 10, under the date June 1928, that the “Head [of] Buhlich [in] plastiline” was in his studio (at 55 West Eighth Street in New York’s Greenwich Village), and he illustrated the note with a recognizable sketch of the portrait (Gaston Lachaise Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). The model was also mentioned in a letter of November 6, 1928, from painter Bertram Hartman and his wife, Augusta, to Lachaise’s wife, Isabel, that recounts Hartman’s recent visit to Lachaise’s studio: “The [composer Edgard] Varèse & Buhlig heads facing each other are a splendid pair” (Lachaise Foundation). Around the same time that Lachaise modeled Buhlig’s portrait, he created a Plastiline model of Buhlig’s right hand and arm, then cast it in plaster. Neither work was realized in a final material until shortly after Buhlig’s death in 1952, when the pianist’s friends and pupils raised the funds to have the two plaster models cast in bronze by the Modern Art Foundry, New York, with the authorization of Lachaise’s widow, for donation to the Los Angeles County Museum of History, Science, and Art. No other bronze casts of the bust have been made.

The model for Portrait of Richard Buhlig has sometimes been dated 1928–1929, yet no evidence supports the view

that Lachaise worked on it after 1928. The Lachaise Foundation owns the

artist’s plaster model, and has assigned the inventory number LF 80 to the

sculpture.