Gaston Lachaise

(American/French, 1882-1935)

Woman on Divan (Woman on Sofa, Woman on a Couch) [LF 69]
model circa 1919, revised 1923? (by 1928), cast 1979

bronze with brown patina

stamped Lachaise Estate, numbered 7/11, inscribed Modern Art Fdry. N.Y. (base)

Height: 9 inches.

Property from the Estate of Joan Conway Crancer, St. Louis, Missouri

Provenance:

Lachaise Foundation, Boston

Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, by 1982

Acquired directly from the above, February 13, 1982

Literature:

Bourgeois Gallery, Exhibition of Sculptures and Drawings by Gaston Lachaise, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1920, no. 2 (Portrait [LF 196] referenced)

E. E. Cummings, "Gaston Lachaise," The Dial, vol. 68, no. 2, 1920, pp. 203-04 and following (Portrait [LF 196] illustrated, front view)

Society of Independent Artists, 1920 Catalogue of the Fourth Annual Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1920, no. 439, n.p. (Portrait [LF 196] referenced)

Henry McBride, “Society of Independent Artists Provides a School for Critics,” New York Herald, New York, March 21, 1920, p. 56 (Portrait [LF 196], back view, illustrated)

A. E. Gallatin, Gaston Lachaise: Sixteen Reproductions in Collotype of the Sculptor's Work, New York, 1924, p. 51 (plaster model of either Portrait [LF 196] or Woman on Divan [LF 69] referenced)

Brummer Gallery, Lachaise, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1928, no. 10 (the first cast referenced as Woman on Divan)

Gilbert Seldes, Profile of Gaston Lachaise, "Hewer of Stone," The New Yorker, New York, April 4, 1931, p. 28 (Portrait [LF 196] referenced as “a [plaster] cast”)

Museum of Modern Art, Gaston Lachaise: Retrospective Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1935, no. 13, p. 24 (the first bronze cast referenced as Woman on Sofa, 1918-1923); pl. 13 (Portrait [LF 196] illustrated, front view, as the bronze cast)

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935) Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, 1964, no. 69 (another cast illustrated)

Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, Drawings and Sculpture by Gaston Lachaise, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1966, n.p. (another cast illustrated)

Hilton Kramer, The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, New York, 1967, pl. 44, p. 49 (another cast illustrated)

Donald Bannard Goodall, "Gaston Lachaise: Sculptor," PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1969, I, pp. 306, 307-08, 516, 518-19, 548-49n. 85, 559nn. 147 and 149; II, pp. 55-56, 273-76, 420, 423, Plate XXV (Portrait [LF 196] illustrated as Woman on Sofa (home), front view, plaster), Plate XCCIII-A (the broken plaster model of Woman on Divan [LF 69] illustrated as the first bronze cast), Plate CXXIII-B (the first bronze cast of Woman on Divan [LF 69] illustrated)

Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, Gaston Lachaise, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1973, n.p. (another cast illustrated)

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, New York, 1974, fig. 293, pp. 218-19, 248, 709-10 (another cast illustrated)

Gerald Nordland, Gaston Lachaise The Man and His Work, New York, 1974, fig. 48, pp. 45, 108-10 (Portrait [LF 196] illustrated with incorrect provenance); fig. 49 (the first cast of Woman on Divan [LF 69] illustrated)

University of Rochester, Memorial Art Gallery, Gaston Lachaise, exhibition catalogue, Rochester, New York, 1979, no. 33, pp. 5, 6, 31 (another cast referenced)

San Bernardino, California State College, The Art Gallery, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, San Bernardino, 1980, no. 20, figs. 40a-40b, pp. 29, 36, 51 (another cast illustrated)

Palm Springs Desert Museum, Gaston Lachaise: 100th Anniversary Exhibition, Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Palm Springs, Calif., 1982, no. 40, p. 34 (another cast referenced)

Portland Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture & Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Portland, Maine, 1984, no. 55, p. 55 (another cast referenced)

Salander O’Reilly Galleries, Gaston Lachaise (1982-1935): Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1998, no. 30, n.p. (another cast illustrated)

Julia Day, Jens Stenger, Katherine Eremin, Narayan Khandekar and Virginia Budny, Gaston Lachaise: Characteristics of His Bronze Sculpture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012, pp. 30, 40, 63, 66 (another cast referenced)

Lot essay:

Gaston Lachaise is best known for his sculptures of powerful women inspired by Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1972-1957), his cultured, voluptuous muse, lover, and, from 1917, wife. Yet, by his own account, few of those works are actual portraits of her. The present work is one of those rare exceptions. It began as a plaster model for a statuette named Portrait [LF 196] created in 1918 or 1919 and first exhibited in Lachaise’s second solo exhibition, at the Bourgeois Gallery, New York, in early 1920. Portrait also appeared in at least one group exhibition, also in 1920. Then, sometime after spring 1921, while a group exhibition was being installed, one of the jurors dropped both that plaster model and a second plaster portrait statuette, named Home [LF 298], which represented Isabel similarly reclining on a sofa (like David’s Madame Récamier), although dressed in informal attire and holding an open book, perhaps of her own poetry (on that disastrous event, see Gilbert Seldes, Profile of Gaston Lachaise, "Hewer of Stone," The New Yorker, New York, April 4, 1931, p. 28). Afterward, Lachaise reworked both plasters. It appears that Home had been very badly damaged, and in 1924 he radically revised the remnants of the figure, while freeing it from its background, to become Flying Figure of Woman (Floating Figure) é [LF 48] (Santa Barbara Museum of Art), a quasi-geometrical representation of a celestial goddess, and the point of departure for his heroic Floating Figure [LF 63], which was created in 1927 and cast in bronze in 1934-35 (Museum of Modern Art, New York City).

By 1928, Lachaise had revised Portrait, and in February-March of that year, the first bronze cast of the new version was exhibited at the prestigious Brummer Gallery in New York, as Woman on Divan. That cast is now in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Lachaise had retained much of the original version, in which the forms of his wife’s body, clothing, and furnishings had already been considerably simplified. His most noteworthy revisions are in the tighter modeling of her head and neck and the position of her proper right arm and hand. No longer holding that hand close to her side, she now extends her open palm to break through the implied front plane of the composition, thus lending significant force to her action. This deliberate, enigmatic gesture very likely corresponds in meaning to the generously extended hands in both the first revised version of Home (frontispiece, Julia Day, Jens Stenger, Katherine Eremin, Narayan Khandekar and Virginia Budny, Gaston Lachaise: Characteristics of His Bronze Sculpture, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2012) and Floating Figure. No other casts of Woman on Divan were made until the 1960s, when the Lachaise Estate authorized an edition of eleven casts, producing the first two examples in 1964. Seven others, including the present cast, were issued from 1968 to 2001. The edition includes the casts owned by the Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science, Evansville, Indiana (2/11), and the Harn Museum, University of Florida, Gainesville (6/11). The broken plaster model is owned by the Lachaise Foundation.

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.

Woman on Divan (Woman on Sofa, Woman on a Couch) [LF 69]model circa 1919, revised 1923? (by 1928), cast 1979

Woman on Divan (Woman on Sofa, Woman on a Couch) [LF 69]model circa 1919, revised 1923? (by 1928), cast 1979

Woman on Divan (Woman on Sofa, Woman on a Couch) [LF 69]
model circa 1919, revised 1923? (by 1928), cast 1979

Woman on Divan (Woman on Sofa, Woman on a Couch) [LF 69]
model circa 1919, revised 1923? (by 1928), cast 1979