Radiating Sex & Soul

Gaston Lachaise had a way with women. At his touch, they stirred and swelled, breasts and bellies billowing. Women were plaster in his hands. Sculptures all, they are currently on exhibition at Los Angeles' County Museum of Art, part of the largest collection ever assembled of the late artist's works. A harem in stone and metal, they remind a world obsessed with Pop not to forget about Mom.

Lachaise was a bit obsessed himself. To him, women were mountains, Earth Mothers, the "life force" of the universe. He used them with a kind of explicit symbolism, exaggerating their shapes sometimes beyond recognition, twisting their bodies with almost mannerist intent. His work is frankly sexual; so much so, in fact, that the Museum of Modern Art would not include some of his last and best pieces in its retrospective show in 1935. Many of them were never cast until the Los Angeles Museum put them into bronze for this show. But Lachaise never intended to embarrass or astonish--only to say something vital about the world in the most vital metaphor he knew.

A Girl from Boston. Lachaise loved all women through his worship for one. He was 20, and an art student in Paris, when he met Isabel Dutaud Nagle. She was American, ten years older than he, married, and the mother of a small boy, but nothing could deter their romance. "She became the primary inspiration that awakened my vision," wrote Lachaise, and gave up a promising career in France to follow Isabel home to Boston.

Seven years later, and a dozen years after they first met, they married; Isabel would not get a divorce until her son was safely established at college. Lachaise won some public recognition at the 1913 Armory Show, but by the time of his first one-man exhibition, five years later, his sculptures were still tentative and shyly romantic, showing the influences--Rodin, art nouveau, and Roman sculpture--that he could not fully shake.

Rolling Pastures. He started to work toward "simplification and amplification" of his art, began his important projects La Montague and Dynamo Mother with a naturalistic sculpture and countless drawings. Of a work called Woman, he wrote: "As a vision sculptural, she began to move, vigorously, robustly, walking, alert, lightly, radiating sex and soul." Of La Montagne, he wrote: "Mountains neither jump nor walk, but have fertile rolling pastures, broad and soft as fecund breasts."

Though he did not found a school of sculpting and had no important followers, Lachaise left an indelible mark on the world. Jacques Lipchitz once confessed he was relieved that Lachaise died when he did (in 1935) because there was no room for two such sculptors. Isabel lived for another 20 years, a proud woman considered beautiful even in her 80s, surrounded until her death by a collection of volcanic women sculpted in her image, a husband's legacy of love.

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