Gaston Lachaise 1882-1935

Commissioned by the present owner, 1968

Gerald Nordland, intro, Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935, Sculpture and Drawings: An Exhibition Curated by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, New York, 1963, illustration of another example
Donald Goodall, Gaston Lachaise, Sculptor, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, vol. 1, no. 549n91, pp. 232, 459, 476-77, 478, 481-82; vol. 2, p. 204, illustration of another example
Eunice H. Leopold, "Art Centers, Cross-Country: Four Cities; Philadelphia's Blueprint for Beauty," Art in America, no. 3, 1964, pp. 116-17, illustration of another example
Nebraska Art Association, American Sculpture: An Exhibition Organized to Inaugurate the Sheldon Garden at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1970, fig. 88, illustration of another example
Hilton Kramer, et al, The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, New York, 1967, p. 12, 49, pl. 38-40, illustration of another example
Gerald Nordland, Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work, New York, 1974, pp. 130-33, illustration of another example
Patrick J. Kelleher, Living with Modern Sculpture: The John B. Putnam, Jr., Memorial Collection, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, 1982, pp. 6-7, 56-59, illustration of another example
Kay Larson, "The Collector's: Artistic Elegance," Architectural Digest, December 1986, p. 183
Michael Lloyd and Michael Desmond, European and American Paintings and Sculptures 1870-1970 in the Australian National Gallery, Canberra, Australia, 1992, pp. 160-61, illustration of another example
Virginia Budny, "Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution and Elevation," The American Art Journal, vols. 34-35, 2005, p. 119, illustration of original plaster model

According to Virginia Budny, consultant to the Lachaise Foundation, this heroic Floating Figure, which depicts a female nude hovering with bountiful, outstretched arms, represents the culmination of a stylistic development begun approximately ten years earlier in which the artist "isolated part of the body and treated them as quasi-independent segments" in order to communicate a heightened sense of latent energy (Budny, "Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation," The American Art Journal, vols. 34-35, 2005, pp. 122-23). The sculptor created his full-scale model over an astonishingly short three week period in 1927.  As Rebecca Strand, the wife of the photographer Paul Strand, related to her friend Alfred Stieglitz, Lachaise "had it in his mind for years so it came fluently from his fingers" (letter from Rebecca Strand to Alfred Stieglitz, September 15, 1927).  The plaster model was exhibited in Lachaise's solo exhibition at Joseph Brummer's famous gallery in 1928, and the first bronze cast, included in his retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, is now owned by that Museum.

Other versions of Floating Figure can be found in in the Society Hill Town House Development, Philadelphia (1/5) (erroneously marked: actually 1/7); the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Nebraska (3/7); The John B. Putnam, Jr., Memorial Collection, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey (4/7); and the Australian National Gallery, Canberra (5/7).