Gaston Lachaise

The Lachaise Foundation, Boston, Massachusetts
[with] Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, 1969
Collection of Robert S Pirie (acquired from the above and sold: Sotheby's, New York, December 5, 2015, lot 144)
Acquired from the above sale by the present owner

Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Gaston Lachaise, 1882–1935: Sculpture and Drawings, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1963, no. 38, another example illustrated
H. Kramer, The Sculpture of Gaston Lachaise, New York, 1967, p. 48, figs. 34, 35, another example illustrated
D. B. Goodall, Gaston Lachaise: Sculptor, Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1969, vol. 1, pp. 87, 427, 428, 537n. 13, 569; vol. 2, pp. 419-20, 468, pl. LXIX, plaster model (misidentified as a bronze cast) illustrated
Gaston Lachaise: Portrait Sculpture, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1985, pp. 11, 44-45, another example illustrated
P. M. Kozol, "Head of a Woman, 1918," in American Figurative Sculpture in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1986, pp. 383, 385
Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection, exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C., 1987, p. 89, another example illustrated
Julia Day, Jens Stenger, Katherine Eremin, Narayan Khandekar, and Virginia Budny, Gaston Lachaise: Characteristics of His Bronze Sculpture, Cambridge, Harvard Art Museums, 2012, pp. 30, 64, another example illustrated

In good condition; there are a few faint areas of rubbing.
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Gaston Lachaise’s severe, archaizing Head of a Woman, ultimately inspired by Isabel Dutaud Nagle (1872-1957) whom he married in 1917, was made from a plaster cast of a head he had carved directly in Tennessee marble in 1917, first exhibited (as Bust) in early 1918, and sold in 1922, and that is now owned by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. Sometime after 1928, he used the plaster cast to produce two bronze casts: one, made by 1934, is owned by the Wichita Art Museum, Kansas; the other, mounted on a black marble base on which Lachaise inscribed his name and the copyright date of 1935 with a grinder, is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. Lachaise's widow also issued a third, posthumous bronze cast, which has not been located.

The Lachaise Foundation, established in 1963 to oversee the artist's estate and now located in New York City, assigned the identification number LF 38 to the work and produced an edition of six numbered bronzes, including the present example, each designated as an Estate cast. The Foundation owns the sixth bronze, which was cast by 1979. It also authorized an edition of twelve numbered bronze casts, also designated as Estate casts, to be made from the same plaster cast of Head of a Woman, although with an elongated neck, assigning the number LF 109 to that new version. Nine examples of the long-necked Head of a Woman have been produced. One is owned by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri (1/12), and another, by the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, Arizona (3/12).