Press Release
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Media Contact Troy Ellen Dixon Director, Marketing & Communications 203 413-6735 | [email protected]
Face & Figure: The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise Opens at the Bruce Museum on Saturday, September 22, 2012
Gaston Lachaise was more than a gifted sculptor of the human body. He was one of the finest portraitists of his age.
Greenwich CT, September 13, 2012 – Face & Figure: The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise features key examples of the artist’s work – many on loan from leading museums, private collections and the Lachaise Foundation – that reveal the full range of his vision, with special Press Release attention to the fascinating interchange between figural work and portraiture.
Executive Director Peter Sutton notes that the sculpture of Gaston Lachaise is among the most powerful, recognizable and enduring of the early twentieth century. “The inspired sensuality of his buoyant nudes uplifts us all and the individuality of his portraits achieves an incisive statement of character scarcely rivaled in three dimensions. Face & Figure addresses these two aspects of the sculptor’s work and explores the intersection of their aims.”
Running throughout this contemplative exhibition is the overriding narrative of the obsession Lachaise had with his muse, model and wife, Isabel Dutaud Nagle, who – sirenlike – inspired him to become that rare exception among artists of the 1920s and ’30s, an expatriate Frenchman in New York.
Lachaise’s oeuvre is a sustained elaboration of his intense feeling
for Nagle’s beauty. The series of great nudes that secured his Head of a Woman (Egyptian Head), 1922 Bronze,13 x 8 x 8 ¼ in. reputation – standing on tip-toe, dancing, reclining, floating, even The Lachaise Foundation levitating – are meditations on flesh and space. Lachaise was probably lucky to have crossed the Atlantic in what seemed to be the wrong direction in 1906, since he became the leading representative of French art imported to the New World.
For Lachaise as sculptor and portraitist, the head and face – alternately pensive, noble, aloof, commanding or introspective – inspired superb and complex portrayals. His sitters were poets, painters, musicians, critics, and art patrons, including E.E. Cummings, Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz; a veritable pantheon of the American artistic avant-garde of the interwar years.
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Press Release
According to the exhibition’s curator Kenneth Silver, New York University Professor of Modern Art and Bruce Museum Adjunct Curator, sculptural freedom in the art of Lachaise by no means resides only in the robust sexuality of his nudes. “It is conveyed, just as powerfully, in the thrilling implication of physical movement with which nearly all his three-dimensional figures are endowed.”
Perhaps the most remarkable of these is the nude figure of critic, historian and founder of the New York City Ballet, Lincoln Kirstein, a work recently acquired by the Bruce Museum. One of only two examples of the sculpture (the Whitney Museum of American Art possesses its twin), the 23½-inch bronze confounds the usual distinction between figure and portrait, as its bifurcated title – Man Walking (Portrait of Lincoln Kirstein) – indicates. Alluding to dance and oration – the figure’s mouth is open, as if speaking, and his hand extended, as if making an intellectual point – the sculptural form was in fact inspired by a statuette of the Egyptian god Amun that Lachaise and Kirstein admired.
As he curated the exhibition, Silver sought to raise a number of compelling questions – Does the aesthetic appreciation of the nude rule out a more intense study of personality, and conversely, does portraiture, with its focus on specific character traits, interfere with the pursuit of beauty? What, in fact, did Lachaise intend by portraying Lincoln Kirstein nude: a revelation of the young man’s personality, the “naked truth” or a device for distancing us from the specific man by means of an idealized portrayal, free of social trappings? Was Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Hyatt Mayor right when he said, three years before the sculptor’s death, “In a sense every figure of Lachaise’s is a portrait – an individual struggling against a particular fate”? These and other compelling issues are explored in Face & Figure: The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise.
Accompanied by a major scholarly catalogue with contributions by Silver, Sutton, Paula Hornbostel (Curator of the Lachaise Foundation) and Laura Hovenac (Bruce Museum Zvi Grunberg Intern 2011-2012), the exhibition runs through January 6, 2013.
About the Bruce Museum Explore Art and Science at the Bruce Museum, located at One Museum Drive in Greenwich, Connecticut. The Museum is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday from 1 pm to 5 pm; closed Mondays and major holidays. Admission is $7 for adults, $6 for students up to 22 years, $6 for seniors and free for members and children under 5 years. Individual admission is free on Tuesday. Free on-site parking is available and the Museum is accessible to individuals with disabilities. For additional information, call the Bruce Museum at (203) 869-0376 or visit the website at www.brucemuseum.org.
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