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Floating Figure
Floating Figure (1927, bronze), no. 5 from an edition of 7, National Gallery of Australia
ArtistGaston Lachaise

Floating Figure is a 1927 sculpture by Gaston Lachaise.[1][2][3]

Gaston Lachaise’s Floating Figure is a modernist allegorical statue of the artist’s muse as an enlightened, ‘floating’ nude woman.[4] It is ultimately based on a portrait statuette of the artist’s wife, Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1872–1957), made in about 1919, that was broken sometime after the spring of 1921 and reworked by Lachaise in about 1924 to create a new statuette of a schematized, fragmentary figure.[5] The damage to the initial statuette had fortuitously freed his imagination from a more literal representation of Isabel at home with a book, and enabled him to envisage a soaring, semiabstract work that explicitly conveys a universal meaning.

Lachaise created the larger-than-life plaster model of Floating Figure at his country home in Georgetown, Maine, in three weeks’ time.[6] The full-scale plaster model of Floating Figure was exhibited as Woman in Lachaise’s important show at the Brummer Gallery, New York, in early 1928, when it was described as “a seated woman who by the power of her gestures seems suspended in space,”[7] and envisioned in a garden setting.[8] Lachaise had the full-scale model cast in bronze in December 1934/January 1935, in time for inclusion, as Floating Woman, in his retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in early 1935; the show also included a bronze cast of the refashioned statuette (now owned by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, California).[9][10] The foundry that produced the first cast of Floating Figure is unknown, although it was very likely either the Gargani or the Kunst foundry, both of which Lachaise was using around that time.[11] The cast was donated in 1937 to the Museum of Modern Art, and was dramatically displayed in the museum’s garden for many years.

Casts

In addition to the Museum of Modern Art cast of Floating Figure,[12] eight bronze casts have been made. An edition of seven casts was produced between 1963 and 2005 for the Lachaise Foundation by the Modern Art Foundry in Queens, New York. The first five casts in the edition were acquired by the Society Hill Project in Philadelphia,[13] the Ray Stark Collection in Beverly Hills, California, the Sheldon Museum of Art at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln in Lincoln, Nebraska,[14] the Putnam Collection of Sculpture at Princeton University in New Jersey,[15] and the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra.[16] An Artist’s Proof was made in 2015 for the Lachaise Foundation, also by the Modern Art Foundry, and was donated in 2019 to the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris.[17]

See also

References

  1. ^ Hodara, Susan (29 September 2012). "'Face and Figure: The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise,' at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Conn". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 15 January 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  2. ^ "Floating figure displays Gaston Lachaise's fertile imagination". theaustralian.com.au. Archived from the original on 13 January 2018. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  3. ^ Boström, A.; Bedford, C.; Curtis, P.; Hunt, J.D.; J. Paul Getty Museum (2008). The Fran and Ray Stark Collection of 20th-century Sculpture at the J. Paul Getty Museum. J. Paul Getty Museum. ISBN 9780892369041. Archived from the original on 28 April 2022. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  4. ^ Lachaise, Gaston. “A Comment on My Sculpture.” Creative Art, vol. 3, no. 2, August 1928, p. xxiii.
  5. ^ Budny, Virginia. "Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation." The American Art Journal, vols. 34–35 (2003–2004), pp. 62–143. JSTOR 351057
  6. ^ As reported by a guest, Rebecca Salsbury Strand, in a letter of September 15, 1927, to Alfred Stieglitz: “He has made a thrilling figure …. It is a cosmic thing – he did it in three weeks – he had it in his mind for years so it came fluently from his fingers —“; Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O'Keeffe Archive, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
  7. ^ "Exhibitions in New York: Gaston Lachaise, Brummer Galleries.” Art News, vol. 26, no. 22, March 3, 1928, p. 11.
  8. ^ McBride, Henry. "Lachaise Exhibition Scores: Sculptor Definitely Comes into His Own in Present Display." New York Sun (New York, N.Y.), March 3, 1928, p. 10.
  9. ^ Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gaston Lachaise: Retrospective Exhibition. Exhibition catalogue. New York: The Museum, 1935, nos. 31, 27; https://assets.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1994_300061878.pdf.
  10. ^ The first bronze cast of the statuette lacks the nude’s proper right forearm and feet; https://collections.sbma.net/objects/12025/floating-woman?ctx=a4e52decf0921e7a7257f109cc6d6dfdea3a1a4d&idx=3. Subsequent casts of the statuette, all made after Lachaise’s death, also lack the proper left arm. An early example of those later casts is owned by the Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, Michigan; https://dia.org/collection/floating-woman-51616.
  11. ^ On foundries used by Lachaise: Day, Julia, Jens Stenger, Katherine Eremin, Narayan Khandekar, and Virginia Budny. "Gaston Lachaise's Bronze Sculptures in the Fogg Museum." Journal of the American Institute for Conservation, vol. 49, no. 1, Spring-Summer 2010, pp. 1–26. JSTOR 41320430
  12. ^ "Gaston Lachaise. Floating Figure. 1927 (cast 1935)". MoMA. Archived from the original on 8 April 2016. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  13. ^ "Floating Figure (1927, cast 1963)". Association for Public Art.
  14. ^ Janovy, K.O.; Siedell, D.A. (2005). Sculpture from the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery. University of Nebraska. ISBN 9780803276291. Archived from the original on 28 April 2022. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  15. ^ "Floating Figure | Princeton University Art Museum". artmuseum.princeton.edu. Archived from the original on 28 April 2022. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  16. ^ "International Paintings and Sculpture | Floating figure". nga.gov.au. Archived from the original on 13 September 2015. Retrieved 24 February 2018.
  17. ^ https://www.mam.paris.fr/fr/collections-en-ligne#/artwork/gaston-lachaise-floating-woman-180000000238520?page=1&filters=authors%3ALACHAISE%20Gaston%E2%86%B9LACHAISE%20Gaston,,checkbox%3Awithimage%3AAvec%20image.
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