|
HERE WE PUT TOGETHER an impressive selection of artists (in fact the greatest artists of the 20th century) and focused on works related to the figure. I am personally a big fan of the figurative work, and was quite proud we were able to put together a show of this quality. -JOHN- IN THE HISTORY of modern sculpture the art of Gaston Lachaise occupies an important but an anomalous position. A great sculpture Lachaise undoubtedly was, but among his peers in this century he is one of the most difficult to place with any finality, for his work embraces two worlds and its characteristic realization bears the mark of their collision. To grasp the full significance of this sculpture, to see the ways in which the artist joined the heritage of one world with the peculiar pressures of the other and thus converted a potentially disruptive history into an art of remarkable originality, consistency, and force, it is essential to see the work itself in the context of the drama that produced it. Though, like all great art, LachaiseВ’s ultimately stands free of both biography and history, our understanding of his work is considerably enhanced by some knowledge of the way he came to create it. Lachaise was born in Paris, in 1882, and was apparently committed to his vocation at an early age. He was trained while still a youth at the EВ’cole Bernard Palissy and the AcadeВ’mie Nationale des Beaux-Arts. In all matters of craft and artisanship, and in the tenor of the sensibility that governed them, he was French. As a mature artist he had at his fingertips all the refinement and facility of technique that were once the glory of the great European art academies. Yet the maturity of his art belongs to America. It was in America that his art first came to flower. It was under the pressure of his American experience that Lachaise developed his own extraordinary vision and came to produce a sculptural oeuvre that resembles no other side of the Atlantic.1 (1) Hilton Kramer, The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, 1967 |
|
