Gaston Lachaise’s Story: Sculptor / Husband

Gaston Lachaise’s inspiration was his beloved wife. I first saw his monumental work, “Standing Woman,” in a courtyard in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City over 40 years ago. I’ve never forgotten her – or the story of how she came to be created. She’s another example of how the goddess moves us from the specific to the eternal.

 Lachaise was a young French artist working in Paris in the early twentieth century, when he met and fell in love with Isabel Dutaud Nagle, a married American woman ten years his senior. She became his lifelong muse. He left France, followed her back to the United States, and married her. She became his model as well as his wife. Her voluptuous figure was the incarnation of his vision of the Ideal Woman. 

Life wasn’t easy for them. To earn a living, Lachaise first labored as a full time assistant to two well-known academic sculptors, developing his own projects in his spare time. He is most famous for his magnificent nude bronze sculptures celebrating Isabel’s robust, erotic beauty.

His nudes have been compared to the work of Renoir – a painter who also loved women. But for me, “Standing Woman” makes a far stronger statement. She is a true modern goddess, rivaling the glorious marble statues of female deities from ancient Greece. But, unlike them, she has no drapery to hide her body, no symbols of authority to assert her power. Proud, unashamed, and sublimely confident and relaxed in her femininity, she is an inspiration. She has become an icon of the Divine Feminine.  Lachaise died in 1935, and is considered to be one of the greatest sculptors of his time.

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Standing Woman. Museum of Modern Art.  Lachaise’s splendid homage to Isabel needs no icons of authority to attest to her divinity. Her body and attitude proclaim her to be a goddess. For more info visit: www.sculpturewoman.com/Lachaise.html