Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935) Woman (Figure with Background) (high relief) (LF65), c. 1912-17 Bronze with brown patina, with signature incised, inscribed 'LACHAISE ESTATE,' numbered 4/12, stamped with Modern Art Foundry and Founder's Guild insignias on the base, cast May 1984. height 12 1/2 in. (31.8 cm) Footnotes: Provenance Lachaise Foundation, Boston, 1984 [with]Mitzi Landau, Los Angeles, from the above, February 1986 Private collection, Los Angeles, from the above, November 1986 Private collection, daughter of the above, from the above as a gift (probably 1986) Private collection, Rhode Island, daughters of the above and by descent from the above. Literature Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise 1882-1935: Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles, California, 1963, catalogue no. 65, another example illustrated. Donald Bannard Goodall, Gaston Lachaise: Sculptor, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969, vol. I, p. 337, 407n.37, vol. 2, pp. 75-76, 437, Plate XXXV, the plaster model illustrated. Gerald Nordland, 'Lachaise's Twentieth-Century Woman,' Arts in Virginia, vol. 20, no. 3, Spring 1980, p. 18, fig. 3, another example illustrated. Salander-O'Reilly Galleries (New York, N.Y.), Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935): Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, 1998, n.p., Plate 27, another example illustrated. Virginia Budny, 'Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation,' The American Art Journal, vols. 34-35, 2003-2004, pp. 96, 97, 98, 105, 107-109, 138n.105, fig. 28, another example illustrated. Note We are grateful to Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation, for preparing the following catalogue entry for this work. Gaston Lachaise developed the model of Woman (Figure with Background) [LF 65], a high relief, from a mold of the front half of Woman [LF 288], a statuette of a lightly-draped nude made in about 1912. The bronze cast of that statuette, made in about 1917 and recently located in a private collection, is illustrated in Virginia Budny, 'Gaston Lachaise's American Venus: The Genesis and Evolution of Elevation,' The American Art Journal, vols. 34-35, 2003-2004, p. 98, fig. 30. The 'environment' that surrounds the young woman in the high relief and endows her with a mood of meditative solitude is, in fact, a record of the seam separating the two halves the plaster mold made from the earlier statuette. Lachaise's decision to use this trace of the sculptural process as an important feature of the relief exemplifies his experimental, modernist aesthetic. According to his own records, the plaster model for the relief was made by 1917, and the first bronze was produced by 1925, although it likely dates from about 1917. The bronze, now in a private collection, is illustrated in Budny 2003-2004, p. 96, fig. 28. Another early cast may have been made, although little is known about it today. Of a projected edition of twelve bronze casts authorized in 1963 by the Lachaise Foundation, nine have been produced by 1999. The present example, cast in May 1984, is one of four Estate casts acquired by a grandfather of the consignors. Three of them, intended for each of his children, were purchased in October 1986. For further information on this lot please visit Bonhams.com For further information about this lot please visit the lot listing