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, 1989.
Private Collection, New York (acquired directly from the above on June 20, 1989).
By descent in the family to the present owner.

Exhibited:
New York, Menconi-Schoelkopf Gallery, 2014.
New York, Christie's, "Rockefeller Center and the Rise of Modernism in the Metropolis," January 17 - February 25, 2015 (illustrated p. 24 in the accompanying exhibition catalogue).

Literature:
Donald Bannard Goodall, Gaston Lachaise: Sculptor, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, 1969, vol. 1, p. 427; vol. 2, p. 469, the plaster model and another example referenced, as cast in 1963, from an edition of three casts.
Palm Springs Desert Museum, Gaston Lachaise: 100th Anniversary Exhibition, Sculpture and Drawings, an exhibition catalogue, Palm Springs, 1982, pp. 28, 34, no. 23 (another example illustrated).
Portland Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture & Drawings, an exhibition catalogue, Portland, Maine, 1984, p. 35, no. 25 (the painted plaster model referenced).
P. M. Kozol, "Head of a Woman, 1918," American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1986, p. 385, the plaster model and two other examples referenced.
Salander-O'Reilly Galleries & Meredith Long Gallery, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture, an exhibition catalogue, New York, 1991, pp. 24-25, 81, fig. 5 (another example illustrated).
Galerie Gerald Piltzer, Gaston Lachaise Sculptures, an exhibition catalogue, Paris, 1992, pp. 31, 60, no. 31 (another example illustrated).
Sam Hunter, Lachaise, New York, 1993, pp. 48, 86-87, 242 (another example illustrated).
Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935): Sculpture and Drawings, an exhibition catalogue, New York, 1998, n.p., plate 20 (another example illustrated).
Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935, an exhibition catalogue, Paris, 2007, pp. 21, 80, 188, no. 28, fig. 8, plate 47 (another example illustrated).
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Marking 20 Years: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri, 2014, p. 90 (another example illustrated).

Lot Essay:
Gaston Lachaise’s austere Head of Woman (Long Neck) [LF 109] represents a wide-eyed, serious-looking woman whose long hair is wrapped into two no-nonsense rolls at the nape of her neck. The head is a tribute to the self-assured, self-actualizing American woman of his time, as epitomized by his wife, Isabel Duteau (or Dutaud) (1872–1957), whom he married in 1917. It is ultimately based on a version that Lachaise had freely carved in marble (actually limestone) in 1917 (LF 172; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, accession no. 68.789, where it is mistakenly dated 1918), and it is one of two versions in bronze produced from a plaster cast made from that carving. Both the marble head and the other bronze version [LF 38] feature a shorter neck, and all three versions are selectively pigmented.

Lachaise’s marble head was introduced to the public in his early 1918 show at the Bourgeois Galleries in New York City. The show, his first, also included two other directly carved heads of a woman (LF 291, LF 21; Private Collection, New York), as well as twenty-five other sculptures of women and animals, as well as twelve drawings. The central contribution was Lachaise’s full-scale plaster model for his Woman (Elevation) [LF 55], a larger-than-life statue of a mature, self-assured nude woman standing on her toes. Although the show received a notably mixed critical response because of both Lachaise’s startlingly unusual, voluptuous figure type and his extraordinarily powerful treatment of sculptural form, Henry McBride, who became the primary advocate for Lachaise’s art, declared, “[t]his statue is a tribute...to the women of this country,” explaining: “He feels, he says and his work shows that he feels, something extraordinary and powerful in our women. They seem to be energy incarnate.” (Henry McBride, "Views and Reviews in the World of Art," The Sun, February 17, 1918, p. 23, illustrated by the marble head). Woman (Elevation) immediately established Lachaise’s reputation in the New York art world, and eventually came to be viewed as a primary icon of early 20th-century American art.

The three stone heads similarly possessed an innovative feature discussed six years later by the sophisticated critic A. E. Gallatin in his book on Lachaise—and, surprisingly, not widely acknowledged again until recent years:

“…Lachaise always chisels [his] heads himself, occasionally directly from the stone or marble [as in the case of the three heads], without first modeling them in clay...this contact with the material is absolutely essential if the sculptor desires any quality in his work, necessary, indeed, if he wishes it to be considered an original work of art. That the vast majority of contemporary sculptors elect to have their works [i.e., models] cast in plaster, pointed up, and then mechanically reproduced by a man who makes a profession of doing this, simply puts such work in the same class as copies" (A. E. Gallatin, Gaston Lachaise: Sixteen Reproductions in Collotype of the Sculptor’s Work, New York, 1924, pp. 10-11; the marble head is illustrated in plate 2).

In other words, Lachaise created the three heads by working out his sculptural ideas during the actual stone-carving process, rather than by making preliminary models and copying them (or having an assistant reproduce the models for him), and thus he achieved in them direct, authentic expressions of his creative impulse. In the same discussion of Lachaise’s heads, Gallatin praised the sculptor for his uncommon practice of selectively staining his marble and stone heads, like the marble example, “as did the Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Gothic sculptors” (ibid., p. 10).

In April 1922, the marble head was sold to its first owner, the artist Margarett Sargent McKean. Sometime earlier, clearly satisfied with his creation, Lachaise had made a mold from the head. Then, sometime after late 1928, having made a plaster cast from the mold, he used the plaster replica to issue the two bronze casts with selectively applied dark brown patina that are now owned by the Wichita Art Museum, Wichita, Kansas, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Subsequently, the Lachaise Foundation ordered an edition of six numbered Estate bronze casts of that version with a short neck from the Modern Art Foundry, New York City, between 1962 and 1979 (at the latest). In the early 1960s, the Lachaise Foundation also issued an edition of twelve numbered Estate bronze casts of a new, long-necked version derived from the same plaster cast of Head of Woman. Nine casts, including the present example, were produced for the Foundation by the Modern Art Foundry between 1963 and 2001.