LF 91

Seated Woman Holding Breasts
(signed—"Lachaise 1931"), 1931
(cast 1963)
Bronze
6 1/4 x 5 3/4 x 2 1/4 inches

Woman with Praying Breasts, 1931 was made during the artist’s late period. Coming on the heels of his elegant manner of the 1920s, marked by controlled modelling and perfection of finish, his later style was characterized by a “creative preoccupation with segments of the female figure, usually the sexual characteristics, to emphasize sculptural volumes,” but also, as Lachaise told a reporter in 1935, to call attention to that which is important.” In this interview Lachaise spoke about his process. “The artist has to go to the soil again and again to be invigorated.” The reporter: “He picked up an 8-inch figurine of a woman with arms wide outstretched in an attitude of prayer. Lachaise assured the visitor the widely outstretched objects were not arms but breasts. He called it his ‘Woman with the Praying Breasts.’” (Interview with the New York Herald Tribune, Jan 1, 1935). As Louise Bourgeois said, Lachaise had one god, and it was a woman, his wife, and he put her on a pedestal both literally and figuratively. This is a perfect example.

In 1930, one year after the crash of the stock market, Lachaise was included in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. A reporter commented on his monumental figure, saying it “contains all the elements of a thrill, surprise and final delight that an important work of art should call for.” (Margaret Breuning, New York Evening Post, Dec 6, 1930) Breuning’s comment may be applied to Woman with the Praying Breasts made the following year. Upon visiting Lachaise’s studio in 1931, the poet and close friend of Lachaise, E E Cummings, made a comment about the modern quality of his work, which Lachaise repeated to his wife Isabel:

“Cummings. . . in seeing the things in the studio told me ‘it is good to see someone “still alive” he said in France they repeat themselves helplessly. Picasso now is an old priest.’”
—(Gaston Lachaise to Isabel Lachaise, July 13, 1931, Beinecke Library, Yale University)

Lachaise’s predilection for the female body runs through his early statuettes depicting Isabel, such as Woman (Nude with a Coat), 1912 (LF 115), included in the 1913 Armory Show, to his sculptures of Ruth St Denis, to his later, more expressive, psycho-sexual works such as Dynamo Mother, cast in bronze in 1933 (LF 104). In 1924 A. E. Gallatin published a monograph on Lachaise. He observed: “It is worthwhile to recall the opening sentences of Walter Pater’s essay on the poetry of Michelangelo, in which he enumerates some of the elements which are common to all vital art, for they make an excellent avenue of approach to a correct understanding and appreciation of the art of Gaston Lachaise. Pater tells us that one is in variably surprised and excited in the presence of a true work of art, but we must be charmed as well, he continues, and the strangeness must be a lovely strangeness, such as the blossoming of the aloe.” Two years later the music critic Paul Rosenfeld noted: “The state of abundance lies about all sculpture by Gaston Lachaise. Bellying molds of somber marble, nickel, and bronze pasture the eye on gravities and amplitudes. Lachaise’s sculpture shows numerous instances of happy abstraction. . .the woman fulfilled in giving life,” (“Habundia,” Dial Magazine, 1926, p. 217).

Key to an understanding of Lachaise is understanding his appreciation of the art of others, from the ancient Egyptians and Hindu sculptors to contemporaries Auguste Rodin and Brancusi. “His visits to the Louvre taught him more than he learned at the École des Beaux Arts,” Gallatin wrote. (A. E. Gallatin, “Gaston Lachaise,” The Arts, vol III no 6, June 1923). The Winged Nike of Samothrace combined with the Asian art he admired at the Musée Guimet and the smooth polished surfaces of Brancusi, inform his unique 20th century vision. His step-son Edward Nagle phrased it thus in an unpublished essay entitled "Lachaise and Houdon" from c. 1933:

Lachaise analyzed the heterogeneous America which Walt Whitman catalogues. Into [his] figure [of] Woman he placed Indians, cowboys, cowgirls, the dancers Genee Pavlova, St Denis, Isadora Duncan, our seashore and mountains, our cities, but also the accumulative power of all great sculpture, to which we are heirs, the Cro Magnon Venus as well as the Venus de Milo, the Minoan Snake Goddess, the Roman Matron, Houdon’s Diana, Siva, Budha, and the love of a great heart.”

The sculptor Reuben Nakian, who met Lachaise when they were both working for Paul Manship, and who shared a studio with him between 1920-1922, described Lachaise’s artistic principle as: “simplify and amplify: amplification and simplification.” (Oral History Interview with Reuben Nakian, 1981, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution). Lachaise himself once said, “What I am aiming to express is the glorification of the human being, of the human body, of the human spirit, with all that is daring, of magnificence, of significance.. . my method is sublimation and amplification of what is significant. My work is my work. I am not ashamed of it. I will not hide it. You might as well ask me to put pink ribbons on it.” “I will not break any bones to achieve effects. The flesh could be distorted, but no bones must be broken. Lachaise considered the “Woman with Praying Breasts,” completed in 1931, as one of his best sculptures (Interview with the New York Herald Tribune,  Jan 1, 1935).

There are five bronze casts of Woman with Praying Breasts known in existence. The first two were cast before the formation of the Lachaise Foundation — the first by 1936, the second in 1963. Three of a prospective edition of 11 have been cast by the Modern Art Foundry, overseen by the Lachaise Foundation. 1/11 was cast by 1970 and sold to the Fort Worth Art Center. 2/11, this cast, was cast in 1973 and has been in the traveling exhibition since that date. It was last exhibited at the National Arts Club. 3/11 belonged to the artist Jules Olitski.