Modern and Contemporary Art

Lachaise’s ideal of “Woman,” as a vital embodiment of fundamental force, was his preferred theme in both sculptures and drawings from about 1910 onward, and he continually explored the means to express this ideal in his art throughout that entire span of his career. The three delightful drawings in the present group exemplify his repeated efforts in the years around 1920 to describe the female figure by means of simplified, even geometrical forms--an endeavor that helped to define him as a proponent of the “later tendencies in art” in America at that time- while communicating, through the sheer power of his confident, fluent lines, what he viewed as the potent and healthy sexuality of his subjects.

The first of the three drawings, of a nude woman seen from the back as she is ascending stairs, compares to a drawing owned by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; seen together, they demonstrate Lachaise’s typical practice of exploring close variations on a favorite pose. Both of them, as well as the lovely, sinuous second drawing in the present group, were carried out on similar sheets with holes for string that had once bound them into one of the tablets he had acquired in New York’s Chinatown. A variation on the third drawing is owned by the National Gallery of Prague, in which the composition is almost identical, except in reverse. - Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation