Gaston Lachaise

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, New York.
Acquired directly from the above in October, 1984.
Private Collection, New York.
Thence by descent in the family to the present owner.

Literature:
Winslow Ames, “Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935,” in Parnassus, Vol. 8, no. 4, April 1936, p. 41 (the plaster model referenced).
Edward Alden Jewell, “Museums Set the Pace,” in The New York Times, January 19, 1936, p. X9 (the full-scale plaster model referenced).
"First Section of Biennial at Whitney: Opens to Public, Showing Sculpture, Drawings, Prints," in The Villager (New York, N.Y.), Vol. 3, no. 41-5, January 16, 1936), [clipping] (the plaster model referenced, as Plaster Group).
Second Biennial Exhibition, Part One: Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints," exhibition catalogue, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1936, n.p, no. 32 (the plaster model referenced as Group, Plaster).
Elizabeth C. Baker, “The Late Lachaise, Uncensored at Last,” in Art News, Vol. 63, no. 1, March 1964, pp. 47, 65, fig. 8 (another example illustrated).
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935) Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, LACMA, Los Angeles, 1964, no. 108 (another example illustrated).
The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, with an essay by Hilton Kramer, and appreciations by Hart Crane et al., The Eakins Press, New York, 1967/1987, pp. 13, 53, no. 63 (the present model illustrated).
William C. Agee, The 1930s: Painting and Sculpture in America, exhibition catalogue, The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1968, n.p., no. 63 (another example illustrated).
Donald Bannard Goodall, “Gaston Lachaise, Sculptor,” 2 vols., Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, Vol. 1, pp. 126, 276, 593, 601-03, 657n.2 (6), 666n.56; vol. 2, pp. 349-50, 452, plate CLIV (the plaster cast and another cast referenced; another example illustrated).
Gaston Lachaise, 1882–1935, exhibition catalogue, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1974, n.p. (another example referenced).
Gerald Nordland, Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work, G. Braziller, New York, 1974, pp. 56, 155-56, fig. 87 (another example illustrated).
Nelson A. Rockefeller, Alfred H. Barr Jr., and Dorothy Corning Miller, The Nelson A. Rockefeller Collection, Masterpieces of Modern Art, Hudson Hills Press, New York, 1981, p. 98 (another example illustrated).
Sam Hunter, Lachaise, Cross River Press, New York, 1993, pp. 209-11, 245 (another example illustrated).
Gaston Lachaise, The Monumental Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, LLC, New York, 1994, n.p. (another example illustrated).
Anne Barclay Morgan, “Gaston Lachaise, The Monumental Sculpture,” in American Art Review, Vol. 7, no. 5, October–November 1995, pp. 120-21 (another example illustrated)
Gaston Lachaise, 1882–1935, exhibition catalogue, Gallimard, Paris, 2007 (English edition), pp. 60-61, 189, plate 36, no. 76 (another example illustrated).

Lot Essay:
The full-scale model for Dans la Nuit [LF108], a statue of two mature, recumbent, larger-than-life lovers, is one of the very last artistic projects undertaken by Gaston Lachaise before his sudden death in New York City on October 18, 1935. The composition recapitulates that of his summarily modeled early statuette, also named Dans la Nuit [LF 2], that represents two intertwined young lovers, the male awake and watching as the female sleeps peacefully at his side. That statuette, intended as an idea for a future sculpture, was one of the very last works created by Lachaise before leaving France (his native country) in 1905 in pursuit of his American lover, Isabel Duteau (or Dutaud) Nagle (1872-1957), and it clearly expresses his love for her. She had recently returned to her home near Boston, having met him during a three-year stay in Paris to oversee her young son’s education. The two were eventually married in 1917. Like the statuette, the statue in some ways represents an ideal creation intended to have universal significance, yet now the woman clearly resembles Isabel, so that the statue even more explicitly represents a testament to Lachaise’s profound love for her.

At the time of Lachaise’s death, the model, composed of an unstable combination of materials, had been left unfinished and vulnerable at his summer home in Georgetown, Maine. Five days later, Lincoln Kirstein, Lachaise’s friend and patron, ordered a waste mold of the model to be made for the artist’s widow, and the mold to be brought to New York City for a plaster cast to be made from the new mold. Less than three months later, the resulting plaster cast was exhibited in the Second Biennial of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, as it was “the work which he had intended to send” (“Foreward,” Second Biennial Exhibition, Part One: Sculpture, Drawings, and Prints, exhibition catalogue, 1936, n.p.). The first bronze cast of the statue was made in 1938 for Nelson Rockefeller, and was eventually installed by him on the grounds of Kykuit, his estate at Pocantico Hills, New York, where it can be seen today.

The Lachaise Foundation, established in 1963, later issued an edition of seven numbered Estate bronze casts to be made from the plaster model. Four bronze casts, including the present example, were made between 1985 and 2003 by the Modern Art Foundry, New York.

The Lachaise Foundation has given the number LF 108 to the work.