Polar Idols

In one of Manhattan's plushier galleries last week, the brown-velvet hush was deeper than usual, and the corners darker. In a crisscross of spotlights, beings of stone and bronze bubbled, writhed, ballooned, embraced--or just flumped--with heavy grace upon their pedestals.

They were the work of a man ten years dead, but still roundly reviled and praised. Some art critics have ranked Gaston Lachaise with such recent greats as Rodin and Maillol, and just before Lachaise died, Manhattan's high-powered, streamlined Museum of Modern Art honored him with the sort of retrospective show it reserves for its own short list of probable immortals.

In the current show, Lachaise's academic portrait studies were elegant as ever, but to a new generation of untutored eyes his swollen little abstractions of parts of the body seemed simply unpleasant, and the mountainously female figures on which his real fame depends carried bovine principles of beauty to a brutal and humorless extreme. Some of his figures were life-size or larger, most of the others were only about a foot high, but they all loomed (see cut).

In 1905, when he was 23, Lachaise met the girl who inspired (though she did not model for) his massive idealizations of womanhood. To follow Isabel to the U.S., Lachaise gave up his sombrero, his cape, his wide trousers caught at the ankle, flowing black tie, cane, long hair, and his studies at Paris' Beaux Arts school. He carved belt buckles, buttons and saddles for Civil War monuments in Boston, later apprenticed himself as a stone cutter to Manhattan Sculptor Paul Manship. After seven years' labor, Lachaise was a slick enough portraitist and decorative sculptor to live by his art. Then he married Isabel.

Besides his enthusiasm for Isabel and sculpture, Lachaise had another: books about the North Pole. Said Poet E. E. Cummings, who was among the first to tout Lachaise: "There is one thing Lachaise would rather do than anything else, and that is to experience the bignesses and whitenesses, and silences of the polar regions . . . to negate the myriad with the single, to annihilate the complicatednesses and prettinesses and trivialities of Southern civilizations with the enormous, the solitary, the fundamental."

People of the Temperate Zone, looking for the kind of beauty which improves a bathing suit, would obviously have to look somewhere else.

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