Gaston Lachaise

The Lachaise Foundation, Boston

[with] Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York (acquired circa 1972-73)

[with] Mitzi Landau, Los Angeles (1974-75 and 1981-83)

Mrs. Leona Palmer, Beverly Hills (acquired in 1983)

Private Collection, New York

Austin, University of Texas, University Art Museum, Not So Long Ago: Art of the 1920s in Europe and America, 1972, p. 57

Ithaca, New York, Cornell University, Herbert F. Johnson Museum; Los Angeles, UCLA, Frederick S. Wight Galleries; Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art and Minneapolis, Walker Art Center, Gaston Lachaise Retrospective Exhibition, 1974-75

Houston, Hooks-Epstein Gallery, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture and Drawings, 1980

Los Angeles, Feingarten Galleries, Master Sculptors: 1910-1930, 1982

Palm Springs Desert Museum, Gaston Lachaise: 100th Anniversary Exhibition, Sculpture and Drawings, 1982, no. 26, p. 33 (titled Reclining Woman with Right Arm Raised)

Exh. Cat., New York, Brummer Gallery, Lachaise: Exhibition, 1928, no. 8, n.p., another example listed

Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Gaston Lachaise: Retrospective Exhibition, 1935, no. 26, p. 25, illustration of another example (titled Woman in Chair)

Exh. Cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise 1882-1925: Sculpture and Drawings, 1963, no. 49, n.p., illustration of another example (titled Reclining Woman with Right Arm Raised)

Hilton Kramer, et al. The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, New York, 1967, no. 32, p. 48, illustration of another example (titled Reclining Woman, with Right Arm Raised)

Donald Bannard Goodall, Gaston Lachaise: Sculptor, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 178, 246n. 12, 304, 308, 329, 516-18, 519, 559n. 147; vol. 2, pp. 271-272, 421-422, plate CXXI, illustration of another example (titled Reclining Woman with Right Arm Raised)

Abram Lerner, ed., The Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, New York, 1973, pp. 220-21, fig. 296, 710, illustration of another example (titled Reclining Woman with Arms Upraised (Woman in a Chair))

Gerald Nordland, Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work, New York, 1974, pp. 111-12, fig. 51, illustration of another example (titled Woman in Chair)

Henry J. Seldis, "Gaston Lachaise and the Female Muse [Review of UCLA exhibition]," Los Angeles Times, 26 January 1975, p. 60 (titled Woman in Chair)

Donna Tennant, "Modern Sculpture [Review of Hooks-Epstein Gallery exhibition]," Houston Chronicle, 31 January 1980, section 4, p. 3, illustrated (titled Reclining Woman Right Arm Raised)

Art and Auction, vol. 5, no. 1, July - August 1982, p. 9, illustrated (titled Reclining Woman with Arm Raised)

Sam Hunter and David Finn, Lachaise, New York, 1993, pp. vi, 90-91, 242, another example illustrated (titled Woman in Chair)

Exh. Cat., Washington, D.C., National Portrait Gallery, Gaston Lachaise: Portrait Sculpture, 1985, cover, pp. 56-57, illustration of another example (titled Reclining Woman with Arm Upraised (Woman in Chair))

Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, The William S. Paley Collection, 1992, no. 33, pp. 68-69 and 158, illustration of another example (titled Reclining Woman)

Exh. Cat., New York, Salander O'Reilly Galleries, Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture and Drawings, 1998, no. 23, n.p., illustration of another example (titled Reclining Woman with Right Arm Raised)

Exh. Cat., Roubaix, France, Musée d’art et d’industrie André Diligent, La Piscine, Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935, 2003, p. 91, fig. 64 and no. 35, p. 191, another example illustrated (titled Femme couchée au bras droit levé (Reclining Woman with Right Arm Raised))

Julia Day, Jens Stenger, Katherine Eremin, Narayan Khandekar and Virginia Budny, Gaston Lachaise: Characteristics of His Bronze Sculpture, Cambridge, 2012, pp. 30, 40 and 63, another example referenced (titled Reclining Woman with Arm Raised)

This work is being sold with a certificate from the Lachaise Foundation.

Nude in Chair—Lachaise’s original title for the present sculpture—portrays the artist’s remarkably uninhibited wife, Isabel Dutaud Lachaise (1872-1957), in a supremely relaxed, yet typically commanding pose. That the work represents her, is evidenced by the nude’s full-figured body type and the Spanish comb worn in her upswept hair, as in two of Lachaise’s portrait statuettes in which she is fully clothed: Woman Seated [LF 25] (modeled in 1918; Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas); and Portrait of My Wife [LF 58] (modeled in 1925; Private collection). Writing in 1925, Lachaise indicated that he had begun the full-scale model for Nude in Chair in that year (Gaston Lachaise, typescript, no. 99; Lachaise Foundation, New York). He likely undertook the subject in Georgetown, Maine, around the time that he and his wife were moving early American furnishings into their newly renovated country home, and she swam “au naturel” with their guests, the Paul Strands, “through the icy water with as much grandiose calm as though she were serving afternoon coffee” (Letter from Rebecca Salsbury Strand to Alfred Stieglitz, August 1, 1925; Stieglitz-O’Keeffe papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library).

Lachaise evidently completed the model for Nude in Chair in 1926 or 1927, then had a bronze cast made from it shortly before placing it in his show at the prestigious Brummer Gallery, New York City, which opened in early 1928. (The show also included other portraits of Isabel, such as Portrait of My Wife [LF 54], no. 5 (there titled Woman Standing), and was very clearly dedicated to her). That first, minimally-chased bronze of Nude in Chair, the only lifetime example, was sold by Lachaise to a dealer in November 1929, and is now owned by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. No other bronze casts of the statuette were made until the Lachaise Foundation, which owns the artist’s plaster model, initiated a projected edition of eleven numbered Estate casts; it has produced a total of nine of them, including the present example, between 1964 and about 1984. The Lachaise Foundation has given the number 49 to the work.