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Modern & Contemporary Art (1691) Lot 7

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Modern & Contemporary Art (1691) Lot 7 Modern & Contemporary Art (1691) November 17, 2020 EDT, ONLINE ONLY Lot 7 Estimate: $5000 - $8000 (plus Buyer's Premium) Gaston Lachaise (American/French, 1882-1935) Woman (Woman Arranging Hair) Modeled circa 1912, cast 1956/1961, signed and stamped with foundry mark 'Roman Bronze Works. Inc. N.Y.' at bottom. Bronze with brown patina on stone base. height: 10 1/4 in. (26cm) width: 5 1/8 in. (13cm) depth: 4 1/4 in. (10.8cm) base: 15/16 x 5 7/16 x 4 7/16 in. (2.4 x 13.8 x 11.3cm) Provenance: "Modern Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture," Sotheby's, New York, October 22, 1976, lot 411. Dorothy Levitt Beskind, New York, New York (acquired directly from the above sale). The Estate of Dorothy Levitt Beskind, New York, New York. LITERATURE: A. E. Gallatin, Gaston Lachaise: Sixteen Reproductions in Collotype of the Sculptor's Work, New York: E. P. Dutton & Company, 1924, p. 51, another example referenced as one of 25 small bronze figures, 1906-1917. B. G., Review of Gaston Lachaise's Show at the Weyhe Gallery, New York, Arts, vol. 30, no. 4 (January 1956), p. 22, another example illustrated. Parker Tyler, Review of Gaston Lachaise's Show at the Weyhe Gallery, New York, Art News, vol. 54, no. 9 (January 1956), p. 50, another example illustrated. Collecting Modern Art: Paintings, Sculpture, and Drawings from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Harry Lewis Winston, exhibition catalogue, Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1957, p. 57, no. 57, another example referenced. Gaston Lachaise 1882-1935: An Exhibition Organized by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, exhibition catalogue, Fort Worth: Fort Worth Art Center, 1963, n. p., no. 5, another example referenced (as Woman Looking Down). Gaston Lachaise, 1882-1935: Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1963, no. 7, another example illustrated. Purchase Exhibit, exhibition catalogue, New Mexico: University of New Mexico, Art Gallery, 1964, n.p., no. 25, another example referenced. Donald Bannard Goodall, Gaston Lachaise, Sculptor doctoral thesis, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University, 1969, vol. 1, p. 195-198, 249n. 35, 283, 289, 299n. 13; vol. 2, p. 41- 42, 426, pl. XVIII, another example illustrated. Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise, 1882- 1935, exhibition catalogue, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, 1974, n.p., another example referenced. Gerald Nordland, Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work, New York: George Braziller, 1974, pp. 60-61, fig. 3, another example illustrated. Alfred H. Barr Jr., Painting and Sculpture in The Museum of Modern Art, 1929-1967, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1977, p. 557, 649, no. 419, another example referenced. Gene Baro, "Futurism Preserved: Lydia Winston Malbin," in The Collector in America: Compiled by Jean Lipman and the Editors of Art in America, New York: Viking Press, 1970, p. 185, another example illustrated. Gerald Nordland, "Lachaise's Twentieth-Century Woman," Arts in Virginia, vol. 20, no. 3 (Spring 1980), p. 16, fig. 2, another example illustrated. Patterson Sims, Gaston Lachaise: A Concentration of Works from the Permanent Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art; A 50th Anniversary Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, New York: The Museum, 1980, pp. 8-9, [32], another example illustrated. Gaston Lachaise: Sculpture & Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Portland, Maine: Portland Museum of Art, 1984, p. 34, no. 7, the plaster model referenced. Painting & Sculpture Acquisitions 1973-1986, exhibition catalogue, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1986, p. 134, another example illustrated. Tom Armstrong and Susan C. Larsen, Art in Place: Fifteen Years of Acquisitions, exhibition catalogue, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1989, pp. 70, 211, another example referenced. Alicia Legg, ed., Painting & Sculpture in The Museum of Modern Art: Catalogue of the Collection with Selected Works on Paper to January 1988, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1989, p. 64, another example illustrated. Claude Fournet, "Au Nom du Corps," Connaissance des Arts, no. 483 (May 1992), pp. 100-01, another example illustrated. Gaston Lachaise: Sculptures, exhibition catalogue, Paris: Galerie Gerald Piltzer, 1992, p. 32, another example illustrated (the caption was mistakenly omitted). Sam Hunter, Lachaise, New York: Cross River Press, 1993, pp. 58, 242, another example illustrated. Virginia Budny, "Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation," The American Art Journal, vols. 34-35 (2003-2004), pp. 87, 88, 93, 95, 103, 105, 107-109, 138n., figs. 20-21, 25, 27, the model illustrated. Julia Day, Jens Stenger, Katherine Eremin, Narayan Khandekar, and Virginia Budny, Gaston Lachaise: Characteristics of His Bronze Sculpture, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies, Harvard Art Museums, 2012, pp. 30, 65. NOTE: The Lachaise Foundation has assigned the identification number LF 7 to this work. Gaston Lachaise's Woman (Woman Arranging Hair) is one of twenty-five small figures that were sculpted and cast between 1906, after he immigrated to America, and 1917, when he was completing work for his first solo exhibition, held in New York in February-March 1918. As an expression of Lachaise's vision of a vibrant Woman who radiates "sex and soul," these statuettes convey the abundant vitality that he perceived all around him in his adopted country.[1] This vision was principally inspired by Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1872-1957), his lover and, from 1917, wife. The model for Woman (Woman Arranging Hair) is known to have been completed before August 1913. The first bronze cast, made in about 1917 for Lachaise's 1918 exhibition, is now owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Another early cast is reported to have belonged to a private collector as of 1960, but that cast has not been traced. The present cast, which cannot predate 1947, appears to be one of three casts made sometime between 1956 and 1961 for the Weyhe Gallery, New York, which represented Lachaise's estate from 1955 to about 1961, that is, the cast sold to M. Knoedler & Co., New York, in 1962 and auctioned in 1965. One of the other three casts, auctioned in 1960, is now in a private collection. The Lachaise Foundation, established in 1963 to administer the artist's estate, issued an edition of eleven Foundation casts. The first, made in 1963, is owned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The edition was later reduced to nine casts, and the third cast that had been made by the Weyhe Gallery was designated as the second of these nine Foundation casts. Afterward, the Foundation limited its edition to only seven casts, the last of which was produced by 2003. The plaster model for the statuette is owned by the Lachaise Foundation. - Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation [1] Gaston Lachaise, "A Comment on My Sculpture," Creative Art, vol. 3, no. 2, August 1928, p. xxiii..
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