When Gaston Lachaise died, in 1935 at the age of fifty-three, he was something of a cult figure among a small circle of forward-looking New Yorkers. The French-born sculptor was championed by some of his adopted country’s most progressive artists and supporters of the arts, including the poet e.e. cummings and the painter Marsden Hartley, along with Gilbert Seldes, a critic with a keen instinct for the most characteristic phenomena of the day, Henry McBride, one of the most enlightened American art critics of his generation, the collector Edward Warburg, and the art historian A. Hyatt Mayor. Lincoln Kirstein, as much a devotee of painting and sculpture as of dance, was a fan, as was the painter and patron George L. K. Morris, a founder of both Partisan Review and American Abstract Artists. Alfred Stieglitz admired Lachaise and had exhibited his work; as if to cement the relationship, Lachaise had done portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe and John Marin, artists closely associated with the pioneering photographer and dealer—as he had of Morris, Kirstein, and Gilbert Seldes’s son. But for all the enthusiasm of these discriminating viewers, Lachaise remained relatively little known to a wider public. Less than a year before his sudden death, the Museum of Modern Art had mounted a retrospective exhibition of his sculpture, but, as McBride noted in his rueful obituary, few had paid attention.

These days, Lachaise is anything but obscure, yet even now he is known chiefly for a small portion of his work,