Quick Facts
Born:
March 19, 1882, Paris, France
Died:
Oct. 18, 1935, New York, N.Y., U.S. (aged 53)

Gaston Lachaise (born March 19, 1882, Paris, France—died Oct. 18, 1935, New York, N.Y., U.S.) was a French-born American sculptor known for his massively proportioned female nudes.

Lachaise was the son of a cabinetmaker. At age 13 he entered a craft school, where he was trained in the decorative arts, and from 1898 to 1904 he studied sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts. He began his artistic career as a designer of Art Nouveau decorative objects for the French jeweler René Lalique. Having fallen in love with an American woman, Lachaise immigrated to the United States in 1906 and worked in Boston for H.H. Kitson, an academic sculptor of military monuments. In 1912 Lachaise went to New York City and worked as an assistant to the sculptor Paul Manship.

Lachaise’s most famous work, Standing Woman (1932), typifies the image that Lachaise worked and reworked: a voluptuous female nude with sinuous, tapered limbs. Lachaise was also known as a brilliant portraitist. He executed busts of famous artists and literary celebrities, such as John Marin, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings. In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective exhibition of Lachaise’s work, the first at that institution for any American sculptor.

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Art Deco

art movement
Also known as: Moderne, style moderne
Originally called:
style moderne
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Art Deco, movement in the decorative arts and architecture that originated in the 1910s and 1920s in western Europe and developed into a major style in the United States during the 1930s. Its name was derived from the Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, held in Paris in 1925, where the style was first exhibited. Art Deco design represented modernism turned into fashion. Its products included both individually crafted luxury items and mass-produced wares, but, in either case, the intention was to create a sleek and anti-traditional elegance that symbolized wealth and sophistication.

The distinguishing features of the style are simple, clean shapes, often with a “streamlined” look; ornament that is geometric or stylized from representational forms; and unusually varied, often expensive materials, which frequently include manufactured substances (plastics, especially Bakelite; vita-glass; and ferroconcrete) in addition to natural ones (jade, silver, ivory, obsidian, chrome, and rock crystal). The characteristic features of the style reflected admiration for the modernity of the machine and for the inherent design qualities of machine-made objects (e.g., relative simplicity, planarity, symmetry, and unvaried repetition of elements).

Among the formative influences on Art Deco were Art Nouveau, the Bauhaus, Cubism, and Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Decorative ideas came from American Indian, Egyptian, and early classical sources as well as from nature. Characteristic motifs included nude female figures, animals, foliage, and sun rays, all in conventionalized forms.

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Most of the outstanding Art Deco creators designed individually crafted or limited-edition items. They included the furniture designers Jacques Ruhlmann and Maurice Dufrène; the architect Eliel Saarinen; metalsmith Jean Puiforcat; glass and jewelry designer René Lalique; fashion designer Erté; artist-jewelers Raymond Templier, H.G. Murphy, and Wiwen Nilsson; and the figural sculptor Chiparus. The fashion designer Paul Poiret and the graphic artist Edward McKnight Kauffer represent those whose work directly reached a larger audience. New York City’s Rockefeller Center (especially its interiors supervised by Donald Deskey; built between 1929 and 1940), the Chrysler Building by William Van Alen, and the Empire State Building by Shreve, Lamb & Harmon are the most monumental embodiments of Art Deco. During the 1930s the style took over South Beach in Miami, Florida, producing an area known as the Art Deco historic district.

Although the style went out of fashion in most places during World War II, beginning in the late 1960s there was a renewed interest in Art Deco design. Into the 21st century Art Deco continued to be a source of inspiration in such areas as decorative art, fashion, and jewelry design.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica This article was most recently revised and updated by Alicja Zelazko.