On Art
MELLOW, IAMES R.
ON ART By James R. Mellow Lachaise in Two Worlds The problem of realism in modern art is the problem of the human figure. One reads the history of vanguard art in this century as the progressive...
...The bulk of his work—those statuesque and imposing nudes, rounded, buoyant, endowed with the peculiar, dancing grace of a large woman (Do you remember Wanda in Fcllini's Nixlit.\ i>j Cabiria'.')—can be seen as a celebration of the woman he chose as his muse...
...Thus we have in the later '30s and '40s—under the influence of Kandinsky and Mondrian — the wealth of artists who broke through to pure abstraction...
...Few modern artists have been more frank...
...For this group recognizable content remained an indivisible link between art and life...
...It is as if the artist were driven to translate the exasperations of the sexual act into the attributes of the sex-object itself...
...The truth is that this other tradition has seldom received the close and systematic attention awarded the development of abstraction...
...The publication of the book coincides with the large exhibition of Lachaise's sculpture and drawings which opens this week at the San Francisco Museum of Art and will travel to museums throughout the country over the next two years...
...At first, in figures like Standing Woman of 1912-1927 or Walking Woman of 1922, his sculptures were formed with all the expertise of classical conventions, though the former work (now in the collection of the Al-bright-Knox Gallery) is perhaps more ample and more robust than anything one encounters among the ideal figures of the Greeks or Romans...
...One reads the history of vanguard art in this century as the progressive withdrawal from recognizable content—and the human figure...
...Thus we have during the '20s and '3()s the American Preeisionists, or solitaries like Stuart Davis and Max Weber, who applied to the American landscape and urban scene the structural lessons learned from the Cubists in Paris...
...The Eakins Press has just issued a handsome volume on Lachaise (The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, 140 pp...
...Following this demolition, art progressed rapidly to the empyrean heights of non-objectivity— to Kandinsky's pure abstractions and Mondrian's austere geometry...
...Its achievements lie scattered, like fragments of a ruined architecture...
...The forms are harsh and uncompromising...
...but it is as the sculptor of the female form, and of a particular form in its infinite variety, that Lachaise is justifiably remembered...
...They have none of the pleasurable and salacious refinements of the conventional nude...
...Woman becomes an earth substitute, a landscape, as in La Montague, or a generative force, as in the terrible splay-legged image of Dynamo Mother, combining sexual ardor and the grim physiology of birth...
...There are studies of the male figure in Lachaise's work and portrait heads of his friends—E...
...At the moment, however, critics and scholars who profess an interest in the figurative traditions are considered antiquarians...
...breasts, buttocks, globed bellies swell into a primitive architecture of great force...
...Marianne Moore, John Marin—which form a striking and successful adjunct of his art...
...The reproductions, featuring every major work as well as all of the sculptures included in the exhibition, provide an enlightening retrospective view of Lachaise's oeuvre...
...It is precisely at this juncture— at the changeover from an abstract art based on the figurative to a purified abstraction—that the sculpture of Gaston Lachaise is critical...
...They summon up another era when unabashed idealism was still considered an appropriate manner of discourse about art...
...The drama of Lachaise's work, of his assault upon the traditions of the nude, is a sexual drama...
...Yet Lachaise's subject remained the human figure, the vessel of those humanist values and associations that were being resolutely stripped away from painting and sculpture in his time...
...For French-born and Paris-trained Lachaise, who came to this country in 1906 at the age of 24, was a sculptor whose complete work remained a tribute to the human figure, and more specifically, to the female nude...
...E. Cummings...
...Those painters and sculptors who continued to hanker after a figurative content were classified as reactionary...
...This history begins with the Cubists, who placed a bomb under the familiar genres, exploding them into facet planes that were then reassembled on the surface of the painting...
...In American art, the abstract imperative took longer to establish itself, but it is safe to say that it remains the reigning doctrine...
...today, we are inclined to discuss the mechanics or the dialectical posture of an artist's work...
...He followed her to Boston and later married her...
...It is this commitment which accounts for the audacity and expressive force of his later creations...
...The chief criticism of their work was that it was "literary," a term that evoked the Pre-Raphaelites' excesses...
...Lachaise's woman—a delight, a storm in the blood, a monumental form—was stripped bare of those conventions...
...There is nothing coyly sensuous about these works...
...I think Lachaise was able to achieve such an equilibrium, such a balance between formal daring and expressive content, because he chose a particular image—this woman—and because he clung to it throughout his career...
...It can hardly be called less...
...It includes an illuminating introductory essay by Hilton Kramer, a consistent advocate of Lachaise's achievement in American art, as well as several contemporary appreciations by the artists, critics and poets who formed Lachaise's circle of friends 30 and 40 years ago...
...It is worth noting that in their promotion of abstraction, the Cubists in France were more often successful with still lifes and landscapes than they were with the human figure...
...It is not simply that, in the toils of abstraction, the human figure olfered a less tractable form than furniture, wine bottles, pipes and mandolins, but that it summoned up a world of values...
...His training may have been classical, but his sensibility was modern...
...the figures become strenuous, gross, subject to willful distortions...
...Later in Lachaise's career, the placidity of the ideal is disrupted...
...Nonetheless, in the same period a tradition of realist painting developed that was very different from that standard history of modern art as the inevitable advancement toward abstraction...
...The lesson of this master would seem to be that it is only in the particular—and under duress—that the figurative tradition can hope to survive as a mode of art...
...Lachaise's reason for coming to the United States, where his work achieved maturity, provides a singular story in itself...
...The book and the exhibition honor the anniversary of Lachaise's death in October 1935...
...To be sure, these artists have received a great deal of attention...
...It was against the dead generalizations, the sentimental conventions of the nude, that modern art was in revolt...
...And these values, now proscribed as "humanism" of the worst sort, were no longer a vital concern in progressive art...
...In Lachaise the mold of the classical tradition is broken—broken, one may say, by a sense of life too forceful and too confident, too unbounded, to contain it...
...It was in the later works—Torso of 1928, Burlesque Figure of 1930, the many fragmented torsos of the same period—that Lachaise's sculpture broke out of its academic influences entirely...
...From the time of the New York Armory Show of 1913 to the decline of the Abstract Expressionists, any artist deemed significant—that is, every artist still carried on the books—was inclined toward abstraction...
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...More often than not, though, it has been for their formal discoveries rather than their preferences for luncheon tables, nudes or elaborate symbolic dramas that they have been admitted into standard histories of modern art...
...As Kramer notes, Lachaise "acted as other votaries of modernist disruption acted, and, like them, he left the art he practiced permanently altered...
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...Yet it would be a mistake to see Lachaise as a holdover from the academic traditions of the nude...
...Presumably it will one day be restored...
...The viewer caught bits and pieces of the debris—tatters of newspaper, a shred of caning from a chair—and deduced the original subject...
...It is especially touching to come upon the period tributes—the poems and essays of Hart Crane, E. E. Cummings, Marsden Hartley, and the obituary notice from The New York Sun by critic Henry McBride...
...It seems evident, to borrow a distinction made by Sir Kenneth Clark, that Lachaise conceived of the nude not just as a subject for art but as a form of art in itself...
...This other tradition, too, can claim important movements and master artists: the Fauves, the German expressionists, for example, and individual painters like Bonnard, Matisse, Max Beck-mann...
...It is this rigorous sensibility that places Lachaise among the moderns...
...illustrated...
...At 20, while in Paris, he met an American woman, Isabel Nagle, who became the force and inspiration behind his life and work...
...Kramer's essay, it should be said, neatly bridges these two modes of criticism, elucidating the values that Lachaise's contemporaries found in his work while relating his achievement to present conditions in contemporary art and art criticism...
Vol. 50 • September 1967 • No. 19
