Woman at Large: The gallery received Gaston Lachaise’s artworks from the Lachaise Foundation

Gaston Lachaise (1882 Paris ⁠–⁠ 1935 New York) was an accomplished, world-renowned sculptor who had a major impact on the modernist conception of the female nude. He was of French origin and after his studies at the École des Beaux-Arts, he left for the United States, arriving in 1906 to re-unite with Isabel Dutaud Nagle, an American woman he had met in Paris. Isabel became his life-long muse and an inexhaustible inspiration for his portrayals of the female body. In his sculptures and drawings, which formed an inseparable part of his oeuvre, he tirelessly sought to express his ideal of La Femme ⁠–⁠ Woman that was marked by a monumental corporeality. Soon after arriving in the United States, Lachaise established himself as an American sculptor, who was recognized for his portrait busts and who also created reliefs to decorate one of the skyscrapers of the Rockefeller Center. Yet his work continued to reflect the tradition of French modern sculpture, represented by the work of Auguste Rodin and Aristide Maillol.

Thanks to the generous gift from the Lachaise Foundation, some of the works of Gaston Lachaise are now also in the holdings of the National Gallery Prague. One sculpture and eight drawings are on view in the gallery’s online art collections.