October 1995

Wlkeo anna

By William David Barry k I | he expulsion of Carlo Pittore’s nude figure paintings from the Eden of the Portland Stage Company lobby _ earlier this year calls to mind another embarrassing outburst of public prudery by Portlanders three decades ago. The latter incident, which occurred in 1961, not only illustrates the recurring flirtations with provincialism that some of our citizens seem occasionally prone to, but also places Pittore in the good company of that world class sculptor, Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935).

The Lachaise dust-up commenced soon after Westbrook College president Edward Y. Blewett bought the sculptor’s old home and studio in Georgetown, Maine. On the grounds of the property was an imposing (80” x 27.5” x 17.25”) concrete sculpture representing a standing nude female figure. This larger-than-life work, entitled The Garden Figure, 1935. had been offered to Blewett, but he found that “it would cost too much.”

Instead, he gave permission to the

artist’s estate to leave it in the Georgetown garden, as long as he “had no responsibility for it.”

Apparently, however, the more President Blewett considered the situation, the more he began to think of alternate placement. Reportedly, local lads, armed with paint, had already begun trying to accessorize the sculpture. Even if safety could be guaranteed, Blewett told the Portland Evening Express of 10 May 1961, “I thought it ought to go somewhere where many people could enjoy it. I thought it should stay in Maine since Lachaise had created it here.”

Thus, the college president approached Isabel Lachaise, the artist’s widow and model for the work, along with Donelson F. Hoopes, the first full-time professional director of the Portland Museum of Art, about placing it at the latter. It is hard to imagine any serious art museum in the country that would not have been thrilled by the prospect. Hoopes certainly was, but before he could celebrate the coup, his own trustees warned him that “people are conservative in Portland.”

It took no time at all for Hoopes to gauge the breadth of this conservative attitude. By phone and by mail letters railed against including what many saw as a huge piece of erotica in the P.M.A.’s permanent collection.

One concerned citizen even sent a homemade paper dress to cover the figure up. The dress was still in the museum’s object file when I worked there in the 1970s.

Curiously, the outcry wasn’t limited to the usual pool of local Piltdowners. Rather than simply reporting the imminent arrival of a nationally important artwork in a Maine Museum, the press chimed in with titillating headlines: “LUSTY, BUSTY LADY WILL ADORN STEPS OF ART MUSEUM” and “1,000 LB. NUDE ON WAY HERE LOOKING FOR BOARD AND

ROOM.” One might well ask what sort of corrupting work these citizens imagined was on the way, or who this supposed defiler of public morals had been?

The answers proved far less salacious than the complainers thought, or perhaps hoped for, and far more important to the building of the P.M.A.’s collection of 20th century art.

Gaston Lachaise, the son of a Paris cabinetmaker, was born on March 19, 1882. He enrolled in the Ecole Bernard Palissy at the age of 13 and after a four-year study of art and art history entered the Ecole des BeauxArts. A regular exhibitor in the most fashionable salons, the young artist met and fel in love with an American woman, Isabel Nagle (nee Dutard).

Isabel, whom one critic described as “literally a statuesque woman,” provided Gaston with inspiration and ultimately a point of departure for his greatest works.

After a hitch in the French army, Lachaise travelled to Boston in 1902.

He found work in the studios of academic sculptors Paul Manship and Henry Hudson Kitson, but his real interest focused on new visions which included Isabel. Seldom has one model played such a complete and important role as Isabel did in her husband’s vision. The Maine painter Marsden Hartley wrote, “When Gaston Lachaise found Isabel Dutard, he proceeded to love her, work for her, idolize her, glorify her, resting completely immersed in the abundant warmth of her abundant nature.” Probably the closest literary parallel is James Joyce’s abstract celebration of his wife, Nora Barnacle, as the universal female figures of Molly Bloom and Anna Livia Plurabell in Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake.

I

n 1913 Lachaise exhibited in the Armory Show, the first important exhibition to introduce European ideas of modernism into the United States.

Fame did not elude the sculptor thereafter, though fortune would. His circle came to include the likes of Hartley, e.e. cummings, Hart Crane, John Marin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred

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