Lachaise, Gaston

Lachaise, Gaston (1882–1935). French-born sculptor who became an American citizen in 1916. He was born in Paris and his training included a period at the École des Beaux-Arts. In 1906 he emigrated to the USA, where he became one of the pioneers of modern sculpture. He settled first in Boston, then in 1912 moved to New York, where he became assistant to Paul Manship. In 1913 he exhibited in the Armory Show, and he had his first one-man exhibition in 1918, at the Bourgeois Galleries. This established his reputation, and in the 1920s he became ‘the darling of the poets and intellectuals associated with The Dial, the leading literary review of the period’ ( Hilton Kramer). His most important patron was Lincoln Kirstein (1907–96), a writer and founder of the New York City Ballet.

Lachaise was a consummate craftsman in stone, metal, and wood (his father was a cabinet-maker); he helped to reintroduce the method of direct carving in America, but his most characteristic works are in bronze. His work includes numerous portrait busts, remarkable for their psychological insight (his sitters included the poet E. E. Cummings, the art critic Henry McBride, who championed his work, and the composer Edgard Varèse), and he earned a good deal of his living with decorative animal sculptures, but he is best known for his female nudes—monumental and anatomically simplified figures, with voluptuous forms and a sense of fluid rhythmical movement (Standing Woman, Whitney Museum, New York, 1912–27). Their smooth modelling links them with the work of Nadelman, who was also at this time helping to lead American sculpture away from the 19th-century academic tradition, but Lachaise's figures are bulkier than those of Nadelman and have an overt sexuality that has caused them to be compared with the the nudes of Renoir. (The inspiration for the figures—Lachaise's embodiment of female beauty—was Isabel Dutaud Nagle, a married American woman with whom he fell in love when he was aged about 20; she was the reason for his move to America and he was eventually able to marry her in 1917 after she had obtained a divorce from her first husband. He described her as ‘the primary inspiration which awakened my vision and the leading influence that has directed my forces'.) In 1935 Lachaise was given a nretrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York—the first American sculptor to be so honoured. Later that year he died of leukemia.