American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

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:

Lachaise Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts.

Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, by 1973.

Acquired directly from the above, 1984.

Private Collection, New York.

By descent to the present owner.

Exhibited:

New York, Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, "Gaston Lachaise," October 20 – November 29, 1973 (extended to December 6), 1973.

Roslyn, The Nassau County Museum of Art, "Monuments and Monoliths: A Metamorphosis," September 24 – December 3, 1978, p. 4 (illustrated, p. 7).

New York, Seventh Regiment Armory, Cheim & Read, Art Dealers Association of America: The Art Show, "Gaston Lachaise and Louise Bourgeois: A Juxtaposition," March 5 – 9, 2014, n.p. (illustrated frontispiece and n.p.).

New York, Christie’s, "Rockefeller Center and the Rise of Modernism in the Metropolis," January 17 – February 25, 2015.

Literature:

James R. Mellow, “Lachaise Nude Sculptures Displayed," New York Times, October 27, 1973, p. 27 (referenced).

Gerald Nordland, Gaston Lachaise, The Man and His Work, New York, 1974, p. 55 (the first state of Garden Figure referenced), p. 161, the present cast referenced (as first shown at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery in 1973).

Salander-O'Reilly Galleries & Meredith Long Gallery, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991, pp. 78–79, 84, no. 35 (another example illustrated).

Louise Bourgeois, "Obsession," Artforum, vol. 30, no. 8, April 1992, p. 87 (another example illustrated).

Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Gaston Lachaise Sculptures, exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1992, pp. 25, 60, no. 25 (another example illustrated).

Sam Hunter, Lachaise, New York, 1993, pp. 214–19, 245 (another example illustrated).

Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Gaston Lachaise, The Monumental Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1994, n.p. (another example illustrated).

Donald L. Strong, “Gaston Lachaise, Garden Figure," Masterworks of American Painting and Sculpture from the Smith College Museum of Art, New York, 1999, pp. 170, 257, no. 10, 257-58n.11, fig. 48 (the plaster model and the present example referenced; the plaster model illustrated).

Virginia Budny, “Gaston Lachaise, Garden Figure (1935)," Maine Moderns: Art in Seguinland, 1900-1940, exhibition catalogue, New Haven and Portland, Maine, 2011, p. 112n.1 (this example referenced).

Lot Essay:

Gaston Lachaise’s six-foot-tall Garden Figure (second state) [LF 137] represents a mature, lightly-draped nude woman as a stately, modern-day fertility goddess. Calmly displaying her voluptuous body, while placing her hands on her abdomen and right breast to indicate her generative and nurturing roles, she evokes a pastoral mood of abundance and tranquility. Lachaise developed the full-scale model for the statue from an earlier version, Garden Figure (first state) [LF 175]. Both versions were created by him in 1935, at the height of his fame, shortly after the closure of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City—the first show awarded by that museum to an American sculptor.

The nude in the first version of Garden Figure is posed exactly as in the second version, although she is younger and thinner. According to Lachaise’s widow, Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1872-1957), writing in about 1938, this earlier statue was based on a thirteen-inch-tall plaster statuette created during the period between 1906 and 1917, and then reworked in 1935 as a “study” for the statue. Both statues of Garden Figure were ultimately inspired by Isabel, Lachaise’s muse, whom he met in about 1903 and married in 1917. Yet they reflect the remarkable changes in her physical appearance over the span of several decades. The youthful appearance of the nude in the first version doubtless corresponds to that of the early statuette, whereas the matronly appearance of the second version points to her appearance, at age sixty-three, in 1935. Both versions exhibit the visual language of ideal form and meaning that Lachaise had been taught in his youth. However, the second version displays his own marked tendency, especially later in his career, to enlarge parts of the body of an ideal figure to imply an enormous inner power and potential.

For the second version of Garden Figure, Lachaise worked with a plaster cast of the first version. He retained the same overall pose, facial features, drapery, lower part of the body, and integral base. Eliminating the nude’s long, loosely worn hair (signifying informality or girlhood), he added clay to expand the forms of her torso and thighs. With these changes, the nude appears significantly older and heavier, and endowed with an extraordinary authority and power. This technique for ‘developing’ a sculpture, unusual in America at that time, was practiced by Lachaise throughout his career, and was probably acquired in Paris, where he was both trained and briefly employed before immigrating to America in January 1906. Now, in addition to the nude’s symbolic gestures, her remarkable body, articulated with his masterful understanding of sculptural form, communicates her symbolic import as a source of abiding stability and harmony between humankind and the natural order.

According to Lachaise’s widow, this second version of Garden Figure is unfinished. How he intended to develop it further is unknown. The molds of the full-scale model left in his studio were discovered in 1970, and at the instance of the Lachaise Foundation (which has overseen the artist’s estate since 1963), a plaster cast was released from the molds by workers at the Modern Art Foundry, New York City. Afterwards, the Foundation authorized an edition of eight bronze casts of this version, and two have thus far been cast by the Modern Art Foundry. The production of the present cast, in 1973, was supervised by New York City dealer Robert Schoelkopf. The second cast, made in 1991, is unlocated.

Overall: 77 1/2 x 31 1/2 x 23 1/2 in.

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