?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 5,000 - $ 8,000
GASTON LACHAISE (1882-1935) Woman (Woman Without Beads; Standing Woman with Arms Behind her Back).
Bronze, 1925-28 (cast in 1968, by May 1968). 340x135 mm; 13⅜x5⅜ inches. With the Lachaise Estate stamp and stamped 2/9 along the lower edge verso.
Provenance Estate of the artist. [with] Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, from the above, by May 1968. Acquired from the above by Felix Landau Gallery, Los Angeles, May 1968. Purchased from the above by private collector, Beverly Hills, January 8, 1969. Thence by descent to current owner, Colorado.
Gaston Lachaise's statuette of a serene, partly draped standing woman invites appreciation from every point of view. Lachaise developed the model from his statuette of a woman holding a necklace [LF 17], first exhibited in 1918 as Eternal Force (probably the dealer's name), which he had created and cast in bronze by 1917 (see Virginia Budny, "Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation," The American Art Journal, vols. 34–35 (2003–2004), pages 121-22 and figure 37 on page 107). Although the new statuette is generally dated circa 1918, Lachaise's records show that he revised the earlier model sometime between 1925 and 1928. By eliminating the woman's long necklace, repositioning her proper left arm, and simplifying the drapery folds, he emphasized the harmoniously flowing curves that govern the overall composition. The new work is sometimes called "Woman Without Beads," or "Standing Woman with Arms Behind Her Back," although Lachaise doubtless referred to it as "Woman" in reference to the "vision" inspired by his beloved that he both sought to convey in many of his works, and explained in his article on his sculpture published in the August 1928 issue of Creative Art.
Two bronze casts were produced by 1937, when the second cast, made by the Gargani Foundry, was lent by Lachaise's widow to the Whitney Museum of American Art for a retrospective exhibition of his drawings and small sculptures. That second cast appears to be the Gargani bronze that appeared in recent years. Four other casts were made between 1956 and 1961 by the Modern Art Foundry (which had been casting Lachaise's sculptures since 1944). Two of those casts belong to The San Diego Art Museum and the Phoenix Art Museum. The Lachaise Foundation, established in 1963, issued an Estate edition of nine numbered bronze casts–including the present example–between 1967 and 2001, all of them produced by the Modern Art Foundry. Although most of the casts reproduce the wooden base on which the plaster model is mounted, at least one, the bronze in San Diego, does not. The plaster model is owned by the Lachaise Foundation. The statuette is numbered LF 25 in the Foundation's checklist.
Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation.
