What Do You See? The Collection of Sidney Rothberg, Part III

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:

Sotheby Parke Bernet, New York, sale of June 13, 1978,

lot 19.

Acquired directly from the above sale.

Literature:

Gaston Lachaise, “Three Crayon Drawings,” in The Dial,

vol. 71, no. 1 (July 1921), following p. 68, copperplate illustration

of drawing by Lachaise (as A Drawing).

Scofield Thayer, Living Art: Twenty Facsimile Reproductions after Paintings,

Drawings and Engravings and Ten Photographs after Sculpture by Contemporary

Artists, New York, 1923, drawings and engravings section, plate 4, collotype facsimile

reproduction of drawing by Lachaise (as Woman's

Head,

1919).

Elisabeth Luther Cary, "The World of Art: Modern Art

of One Kind and Another" in New York Times, January 27, 1924, p. SM10, the

drawing and the collotype referenced.

Clive Bell, "Modern Art, and How to Look at It: A

Critical Appreciation of 'The Dial' Portfolio, 'Living Art,' with Certain

Instructive Remarks" in Vanity Fair,

vol. 22, no. 2 (April 1924), p. 56, the drawing and the collotype referenced;

the collotype illustrated (as Tête de Femme).

Ralph Flint, "More Modernism in New York" in Christian Science Monitor, vol.

16, no. 57 (February 2, 1924), p. 11, the drawing and the

collotype referenced.

Nicholas Joost, “The Dial Collection: Tastes and Trends of

the 'Twenties,” in Apollo, vol. 94 (December 1971),

p. 494, the drawing and the collotype referenced.

Pound, Thayer, Watson, and The

Dial: A Story in

Letters, edited by Walter Sutton, Gainesville, Florida, 1994,

p. 278, the drawing and the collotype referenced.

Lot Essay:

The present collotype of Gaston Lachaise’s Woman’s Head, red crayon on paper, 1919 (Lachaise’s date), is from one of the 500 numbered copies of Scofield Thayer’s Living Art, a portfolio of twenty reproductions of paintings, drawings, and engravings and nine photographs of sculpture by contemporary artists, which was printed by the Ganymed Press of Berlin and published by the Dial Publishing Company in New York City. The originals, most of them owned by Thayer, were selected by him for reproduction in Living Art as examples of “the very best of the very best” artists of his time, and “the first definite recognition of the fact that contemporary art in America is on a

footing of equality with the best in Europe” (Thayer to Dr. James Sibley Watson Jr., March 5, 1922; James Sibley Watson/The Dial Papers, Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations).

The drawing reproduced in facsimile by the present collotype was probably acquired by Thayer from Lachaise in 1920. It was first illustrated, by copperplate, in the July 1921 issue of The Dial (a magazine of literature and the arts co-owned by Thayer and Watson), and was eventually bequeathed by Thayer to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (where it is mistakenly dated ca. 1920). The simplified, summarily defined forms of the woman represented in the drawing lack the refined curves of much of Lachaise’s earlier art, and both signal a pronounced stylistic shift in his oeuvre, and exemplify the ‘later tendencies’ in American art at that time. Thayer considered Lachaise to be America’s greatest sculptor, and eventually owned a total of twenty-one other drawings and six sculptures by him (including La Montagne, carved in sandstone in 1919, and illustrated twice in Living Art). All of those works are now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  

Other examples of the collotype of Woman’s Head belongs to the Ackland Art Museum, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (where it is mistakenly dated 1921), and the Philadelphia Museum of Art (where it is mistakenly dated c. 1921).