American and European Art

Provenance:

The artist

Acquired directly from the above, 1987 

Exhibited:

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935) Sculpture and Drawings, December 3, 1963-January 19, 1964; February 18-April 5, 1964, no. 18

Literature:

Bourgeois Galleries, Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawings by Gaston Lachaise, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1918, no. 20 (another cast referenced)

"Galleries Display Great Variety of New Work, New York Herald, New York, February 17, 1918, 3rd section, p. 8 (another cast referenced)

H. C. N, "Art and Artists: Two Interesting Exhibitions of Sculptures and Drawings," New York Herald, New York, March 6, 1918, p. 14 (another cast referenced)

A. E. Gallatin, Gaston Lachaise: Sixteen Reproductions in Collotype of the Sculptor's Work, New York, 1924, Plate 7, p. 51, (another cast illustrated as Statuette; an unidentified cast referenced among a series of twenty-five small bronze figures dating from 1906 to 1917)

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935) Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, California, 1964, n.p., no. 18 (referenced; a different cast mistakenly illustrated)

Donald Bannard Goodall, "Gaston Lachaise: Sculptor," PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 358-59, 361, 377, 391, 409n. 67, 475; vol. 2, pp. 103-04, 429, Plate XLVIII (illustrated; four other casts of a reported edition of seven referenced)

Selected Letters of E.E. Cummings, New York, 1969, no. 35, p. 48,  (one or more casts referenced)

Lot essay:

Gaston Lachaise’s Pudeur, representing a partly draped nude, was designed to lead the viewer’s eyes around and over the forms of the woman’s slender figure. Her modest pose, like that of an ancient Venus Pudica, suggests that she has been surprised at the bath. The drapery clings to her body in ropelike folds, like the garment of some East Asian deity. The pleasing, compact shape of the statuette suggests that it can easily be grasped and held in the hand, much like a lovely Chinese vase. Lachaise is known to have studied “Oriental and Chinese art ‘to improve his technique’” while assisting sculptor Paul Manship in the 1910s (Letter from Marguerite Zorach to Donald Goodall, May 3, 1959, Gaston Lachaise Collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), and he appears to have drawn on that research when creating the present work.

We are grateful to Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation, for her assistance in preparing the catalogue entry for this work.