About This Artwork

Gaston Lachaise
American, 1882-1935, born France

Woman (Elevation), Modeled 1912-15 (Cast 1927)

Bronze
182.9 x 71.1 x 43.2 cm (72 x 28 x 17 in.) (with base)
signed on base G. Lachaise (c) 1927
Friends of American Art Collection, 1943.580

Born in France, Gaston Lachaise immigrated to the United States when he was 24 years old. He modeled Woman (Elevation) after Isabel Dutaud Nagle, whom he married in 1917, telling her, “I want to create a miracle with it… as great as you.” Although it definitely evokes his subject’s appearance, this sculpture represents Lachaise’s first full-scale expression of the idealized female form that would come to dominate his art. The figure’s long legs support a voluptuous torso that recalls ancient fertility goddesses and a disproportionally small waist that accentuates her ample hips and breasts. Modernists like Lachaise were fascinated by preclassical art because they believed it possessed a primitive vitality absent from later art forms.

Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories

Exhibition History

New York, The Brummer Gallery, Lachaise, Feb. 27–Mar. 24, 1928, cat. 5.

Publication History

Katharine Kuh, “Lachaise: Sculptor of Maturity,” Bulletin of The Art Institute of Chicago 40, 3 (Mar. 1946), p. 31, ill.

Hilton Kramer, The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise (Eakins Press, 1967), p. 11.

Gerald Norland, Gaston Lachaise: The Man and His Work (George Braziller, 1974), p. 74.

Sam Hunter, Lachaise (Cross River Press, 1993), pp. 23-25.

Otto G. Ocvirk and Robert E. Stinson, et al., Art Fundamentals, 7th edition (William C. Brown, 1994), p. 260, ill.

Art Institute of Chicago, Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture, selected by James N. Wood and Teri J. Eldelstein (Art Institute of Chicago/Hudson Hills Press, 1996), p. 32.

Virginia Bundy, “Gaston Lachaise’s American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation,” American Art Journal 34 & 35 (2003–2004), p. 64, fig. 1.

Judith A. Barter et al., "American Modernism at the Art Institute of Chicago, From World War I to 1955," (Art Institute of Chicago/Yale University Press, 2009), cat. 5.

Ownership History

The artist; by descent to his widow, Isabel Dutaud Nagle, 1935; sold to the Art Institute, 1943.