February 12, 1938
Drawings by Gaston Lachaise, approximately ninety in number, will be shown in the print Gallery of the Brooklyn Museum from February 12th through April 4th. A few pieces of sculpture from the collection of Mr. Paul Strand, Mr. Paul Rosenfeld, Mr. Arthur Eggner, Mr. Lincoln Kirstein and Mme. Lachaise will be shown with the drawings.
The drawings, chiefly from the private collection of Mme. Lachaise and never before exhibited, aside from their interest as drawings, shed new light on the processes of the sculptor’s creative imagination, so that they tend to explain and interpret the final forms embodied in bronze.
The drawings are all in line with practically no shading for sculptural form. They are freely drawn with large rounded sweeping curves outlining and emphasizing circular forms and often tending to create a purely abstract pattern of linked circles. The result seems easy, natural, practically inevitable in the drawings. It is seen to spring directly from the swinging movement of the hand drawing figures in simple outline. The effect of course, is the rotund silhouette characteristic of the sculpture of Lachaise. In sculpture this form has many characteristics, weight, mass, fatness, smoothness of flesh, which do not appear in the drawing, but are so impressive in the sculpture that the silhouette is net seen to be the controlling factor which produced these qualities. In the drawings, the use of pure line not only emphasizes the silhouette so that it dominates the form, but has in itself qualities of lightness and grace that counterbalance the mass of the forms themselves. Further more the line is much more shrewdly anatomical, muscular and detailed in its suggestions than is the sculpture where the luxuriance of mass and flesh conceals the effect of detail actually present.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1937 - 1939. 01-02_1938, 030. View Original
