Aaron Anderson
Specialist, Head of Sale
Lot 19
Gaston Lachaise(1882-1935)Woman (Statuette) [LF 115] 10 3/4in (27.3cm) high on a 3/4in (1.9cm) high marble base
19 November 2019, 16:00 EST
New YorkSold for US$4,075 inc. premium
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Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935)
Woman (Statuette) [LF 115]
inscribed 'LACHAISE' and 'LACHAISE ESTATE,' numbered '4/12,' and stamped with Modern Art Foundry and Founder's Guild insignias (along the base)
bronze with brown patina
10 3/4in (27.3cm) high on a 3/4in (1.9cm) high marble base
Modeled in 1912; Cast in 1984.
inscribed 'LACHAISE' and 'LACHAISE ESTATE,' numbered '4/12,' and stamped with Modern Art Foundry and Founder's Guild insignias (along the base)
bronze with brown patina
10 3/4in (27.3cm) high on a 3/4in (1.9cm) high marble base
Modeled in 1912; Cast in 1984.
Footnotes
Provenance
Lachaise Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts;
Gerald Pilzer, New York, and Paris, France, 1987.
Private collection, acquired from the above.
By descent to the present owner.
Exhibited
Roslyn, New York, Nassau County Museum of Fine Art, The Shock of Modernism in America: The Eight and Artists of the Armory Show, April 29-July 29, 1984, exhibition catalogue, p. 76, no. 121, illustrated.
PS Galleries, Dallas, Texas, March 26-April 1985.
Literature
Museum of Modern Art, Gaston Lachaise: Retrospective Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1935, pp. 10, 21, 23 (the model exhibited in 1913 as clay [sic]), 23, no. 3, the plaster model illustrated.
D.B. Goodall, "Gaston Lachaise: Sculptor," 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 285-87, 300n. 16, 348, 408n. 59; vol. 2, pp. 46-47, 427, pl. XXI, the plaster model illustrated.
Ad., Mitzi Landau, Los Angeles, California, ARTnews, vol. 74, no. 5, May 1975, p. 14, another example illustrated.
Portland Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Portland, Maine, 1984, pp. 6, 12-13, 34, no. 9, another example illustrated.
S. Hunter, Lachaise, New York, 1993, pp. 4, 59, 242, another example illustrated.
V. Budny, "Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation," The American Art Journal, vols. 34-35, 2003-04, pp. 77, 78-79, 99, 105, 109, 135nn. 59-60, 137n. 98, figs. 12, 13, the plaster model illustrated.
Gaston Lachaise's Woman (Statuette) [LF 115] is one of a group of statuettes representing robust, super-charged nudes created by him some four to six years after he emigrated from France in 1906. The figures were mainly inspired by his future wife, Isabel Dutaud (1872-1957), and, in the artist's own words, appear to be "radiating sex and soul." (Gaston Lachaise, "A Comment on My Sculpture," Creative Art, vol. 3, no. 2, August 1928, p. xxiii)
The work's plaster model was exhibited twice during his lifetime: first (as Statuette), in the revolutionary Armory Show, which opened in New York in 1913; and secondly (as Woman), in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which opened in 1935--less than nine months before his death. The first bronze cast was made in around 1975 for the Lachaise Foundation (established in 1963), which has authorized an edition of 12 numbered casts. Five others, including the present example, have been produced thus far.
We are grateful to Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation, for her assistance in preparing the catalogue entry for this work.