Colossal

Last week Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art proudly put on exhibition its latest acquisition--a huge steatopygous torso of a woman labeled COLOSSAL (see cut). Dwarfed visitors marveled at its 53-in. bust measurement, its triumphant pose, its defiant backflung elbows, the rhythmic convolutions of its tinted plaster surfaces. Gift of Edward M. M. Warburg, the torso was one more of the vasty works of Gaston Lachaise, whom many a critic rates among the top-notchers in his art.

Like Diego Rivera, Gaston Lachaise somewhat resembles the figures he produces. Even more akin to them is full-bosomed Mme Lachaise who, although she has seldom posed for her husband, has been the inspiration for most of his amply proportioned torsos. Son of a Paris cabinet maker, Gaston Lachaise was an indifferent student at the Beaux Arts. When the woman who was to be his wife left for her native U. S., he followed her, earning passage money by carving figurines for Glassmaker Rene Lalique. He worked ten years in the U. S. before he thought he had enough money to get married.

His first U. S. job was carving belt buckles on Civil War monuments in a Boston atelier. He went to Manhattan in 1911, started work under Paul Manship, also a hewer of the heroic. He did the actual carving on the Manship memorial tablet to J. Pierpont Morgan (Metropolitan Museum), worked on the surface texture of Manship's head of John Davison Rockefeller. By the time he left Manship to open a studio of his own he was earning $100 a week, was a naturalized citizen.

Not all Lachaise works are as huge as the one which went on exhibit last week. He has done a series of portrait heads of children, a graceful group of dolphins, several carvings of animals. His busts include e. e. cummings, Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Warburg, Alfred Stieglitz. But whenever possible he likes to translate his own ideas into colossal terms. In halting, gesticulating English he explains that he tries to make the human figure "symbolic of growth everywhere in the world, to relate it to the immensity of the cosmos. Therefore my statue grows, it has to be big. I cannot help it." He thinks the torso the most expressive and important part of the human body, often exaggerates it at the expense of a statue's head. One of his biggest carvings is a stylized group of women and children symbolizing Civilization on the west fac,ade of Manhattan's Rockefeller Center.

Gaston Lachaise summers in a Georgetown, Me. farmhouse where he raises ducks. In Manhattan he lives in a studio with no telephone in Washington Mews. Ascetic, hardworking, he goes to an occasional cinema or burlesque, rarely to parties. Although he works at fever pitch he tries to calm himself by muttering "Now I am working very coldly, very accurately." When this fails, he takes a subway ride.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.