Gaston Lachaise was a sculptor of life found in portraits and metaphorical nudes that proclaim his love of the voluptuous celebration of human existence. Working in the first three decades of the 20th century, Lachaise produced monumental figures - and small sculptures that appear monumental - in both bronze and marble that attest to his goals. Though Lachaise's oeuvre contains sculptures of a large number of subjects - ornamental architectural adornments; peacock sculptures for the James Deering estate; a decorative frieze for the AT&T building - his passion for the figure drew him closest to becoming the human imperative. The figure of woman cast in bronze as a metaphor for this celebration of the presence of life has loomed controversially in the oeuvre of Lachaise since his early work of the 1910s. Throughout his career and prominently focused in a group of small bronzes, appears the female nude which declares the vitality of the female form - a comment on the history of art from the cave era to the present. Female heads, as seen in Egyptian Head (cover), also give corporeal expression to the concept of woman as omnipresent reference to the mother goddess whose disembodied form oversees the life of humankind. Lachaise invoked in his sculpture, "the Goddess I am searching to express in all things," which he eventually found in his wife Isabel whom he had met in 1902 and eventually married in 1917. The antecedent of these figural works can be seen in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Elevation of 1912-1927. A standing figure of a female nude, rising upon her toes with her fingers reaching upward gives evidence to the notion of lightness and delicacy of a robust body which otherwise declares ponderous weightiness. This sculpture and its subsequent study, Torso of Elevation (in the exhibition), is a seminal work for Lachaise and the model for his subsequent sculptures which utilize the female figure to express the dynamism of existence. It was Isabel, of course; she was the essence of his sculptural expression, his obsession throughout his life. The figures, by and large, are of exceedingly robust forms that were neither the standard of feminine beauty of the times nor descriptive of particular women with whom he came in contact. Though his wife became his muse, she was only present as the spirit of his art not the direct translation of it. During and after the First World War, Lachaise was in conflict with "the cult of slenderness of 1918" which, according to Gilbert Seldes in a 1931 New Yorker article, showed the artist to be "a sort of public enemy of its thin and athletic idea." A classicist born in 1882 and trained in France in the academic tradition the artist came to America in 1906 during the artistic era of expressionism. The avant-garde artist chose to follow in the path of Auguste Rodin, master proponent for sculpture of the human figure as the expression of life. Rodin had introduced in the late 1880s the use of the partial figure from his vast study of sculpture of Antiquity, made partial by the vagaries of time. The human figure, no matter how truncated, still contained the stuff of life, the constancy and persistence of existence. Lachaise's early productive life in America led him to work as a sculptor's assistant casting swords and buttons to complete the academic Civil War sculptures of Henry Kitson. He eventually went to work for Paul Manship where he employed the art of gold working. He later settled in New York maintaining a studio separate from Isabel's apartment where she lived alone. There he worked at night on his own sculptures while drawing a paycheck during the daytime working for others. His friendship with e. e. cummings, Lincoln Kirstein, Marsden Hartley, and others from the intellectual set involved in the publication of The Dial, brought champions to Lachaise's art and engaged interest from among the great collectors of the 1920s and 1930s. Among them, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and A. E. Gallatin were described as "a small liberal elite critical of the narrow philistinism of American culture, and in particular of the inhibited, repressive spirit of Puritanism that denied the body." In Lachaise's complex sculptures fraught with sexual overtones, the artist experimented with the newly publicized insights of Sigmund Freud. Eventually, with the fear of public outcry, his friends withheld Lachaise's more sexually explicit sculpture from his major exhibition of 1935 in the Museum of Modern Art. It was not until years after his untimely death from a sudden, brief bout with leukemia that same year that these works began to be shown. The late works appear to be largely under the influence of such Stone Age fertility fetishes as the Venus of Willendorf which he first saw reproduced in 1923, Marsden Hartley described Lachaise's more "liberated" works as made by "a natural male. . .the indomitable pagan who saw the entire universe in the form of a woman." These figures were faceless and sometimes headless but constant in their emphases upon the generative spirit thought to be consistent with their function of promoting fecundity. In his 1993 art historical analysis of Lachaise's small sculptures, Sam Hunter quotes critic Barbara Rose's definition of the artist's female figure as "a voluptuous mother goddess who is neither madonna nor whore, but an abundant, generous fertility and creation symbol." The Lachaise Foundation through the auspices of the Salander O'Reilly Galleries in New York has brought to the Lore Degenstein Gallery the opportunity to show thirty-nine small bronze sculptures--portraits and figures--along with drawings from the artist's oeuvre. We are greatly indebted to the Charles B. Degenstein Endowment for making our exhibition program possible.   Egyptian Head, Gaston Lachaise, 1923 Lachaise Foundation