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Lot Essay
We are grateful to Virginia Budny, author of the forthcoming catalogue raisonné sponsored by the Lachaise Foundation, for her assistance in preparing the following catalogue entry for this work.
In the view of art historian Winslow Ames, Gaston Lachaise’s "marble Knees … is the most fully simplified of all [his] works, and is almost purely abstraction. The whole object has become a symbol" (W. Ames, "Gaston Lachaise 1882-1935," Parnassus, vol. VIII, no. 3, March 1936, p. 7). The white marble sculpture was commissioned in May 1932 by Edward M.M. Warburg at the insistence of his friend Lincoln Kirstein; both men were among Lachaise’s most important patrons in the early 1930s. The present work is based on a plaster model [LF 174] made by Lachaise by 1932, now owned by the Lachaise Foundation in New York. That model, in turn, is an enlarged version of a three-inch-high plaster fragment [LF 281], also owned by the Lachaise Foundation, and which Lachaise had extracted from one of his statuettes. Lachaise often edited his earlier sculptures in unusual, arresting ways, creating new works intended to condense and intensify the composition’s immediate impact on the viewer while inviting prolonged contemplation.
Lachaise carved The Knees without assistance, and, according to him, work was "progressing" by mid-December, and completed on January 31, 1933. Before delivering the marble sculpture to Warburg, he displayed it on a black marble base in February in the window of the Kraushaar Galleries, New York, where, in his words, it looked "superb." (Letters from Lachaise to his wife on December 11, 1932, January 31, 1933, and February 13, 1933, Gaston Lachaise collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). Towards the end of the year, The Knees was prominently displayed in Warburg’s elegant new apartment, at Beekman Place, New York, which had been designed by architect Philip Johnson.
In 1946, Lachaise’s widow ordered a bronze cast to be made from Lachaise’s plaster model of The Knees for the important exhibition of Lachaise’s art at New York's Knoedler Galleries the following year. That unique bronze cast was sold to a collector shortly after the show had closed, and is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The limbs are more expansively arranged in the plaster model, and the bronze copy, than in the carving, in which the composition fits neatly within the confines of the stone block. This telling difference indicates that the plaster model was not made from the present sculpture, and instead, served only as a general guide for Lachaise when carving this work in stone.
The Lachaise Foundation, New York, has given the identification number 195 to this sculpture.
In the view of art historian Winslow Ames, Gaston Lachaise’s "marble Knees … is the most fully simplified of all [his] works, and is almost purely abstraction. The whole object has become a symbol" (W. Ames, "Gaston Lachaise 1882-1935," Parnassus, vol. VIII, no. 3, March 1936, p. 7). The white marble sculpture was commissioned in May 1932 by Edward M.M. Warburg at the insistence of his friend Lincoln Kirstein; both men were among Lachaise’s most important patrons in the early 1930s. The present work is based on a plaster model [LF 174] made by Lachaise by 1932, now owned by the Lachaise Foundation in New York. That model, in turn, is an enlarged version of a three-inch-high plaster fragment [LF 281], also owned by the Lachaise Foundation, and which Lachaise had extracted from one of his statuettes. Lachaise often edited his earlier sculptures in unusual, arresting ways, creating new works intended to condense and intensify the composition’s immediate impact on the viewer while inviting prolonged contemplation.
Lachaise carved The Knees without assistance, and, according to him, work was "progressing" by mid-December, and completed on January 31, 1933. Before delivering the marble sculpture to Warburg, he displayed it on a black marble base in February in the window of the Kraushaar Galleries, New York, where, in his words, it looked "superb." (Letters from Lachaise to his wife on December 11, 1932, January 31, 1933, and February 13, 1933, Gaston Lachaise collection, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library). Towards the end of the year, The Knees was prominently displayed in Warburg’s elegant new apartment, at Beekman Place, New York, which had been designed by architect Philip Johnson.
In 1946, Lachaise’s widow ordered a bronze cast to be made from Lachaise’s plaster model of The Knees for the important exhibition of Lachaise’s art at New York's Knoedler Galleries the following year. That unique bronze cast was sold to a collector shortly after the show had closed, and is now owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The limbs are more expansively arranged in the plaster model, and the bronze copy, than in the carving, in which the composition fits neatly within the confines of the stone block. This telling difference indicates that the plaster model was not made from the present sculpture, and instead, served only as a general guide for Lachaise when carving this work in stone.
The Lachaise Foundation, New York, has given the identification number 195 to this sculpture.