Page:The Dial (Volume 68).djvu/233

Rh Monet. Temperamentally Lachaise is about as far from the typical Frenchman (more especially from what America likes to believe is the typical Frenchman) as can be imagined; as far, that is, as Cézanne, whose famous hate of contemporary facility and superficiality drove him to a recreation of nature which was at once new and fundamental. Lachaise’s perhaps favourite (French) word is simple. Applied to his work, it means something quite different from, as in Brancusi, a mere economy of form through the elimination of unessentials; it means form which completely expresses itself, form that perfectly tactilises the beholder, as in the case of an electric machine which, being grasped, will not let the hand let go.

We confess that in the sumptuousness of certain of his perfectly sensuous exquisitely modulated vaselike nudes we have felt something pleasantly akin to what are known as the least imperfect specimens of Chinese art. This brings up an interesting trait of Lachaise's character. He believes that the Orient fascinated him at one time to the point of hypnotism and is resolved that the experience shall not be repeated. Significantly in contrast to Gaugin, he turns his eyes to the north. There is one thing which Lachaise would rather do than anything else, and that is to experience the bignesses and whitenesses and silences of the polar regions. His lively interest in Esquimaux drawings and customs stems from this absolutely inherent desire—to negate the myriad with the single, to annihilate the complicatednesses and prettinesses and trivialities of Southern civilizations with the enormous, the solitary, the fundamental.

Lachaise's work is the absolutely authentic expression of a man very strangely alive.

Every one has read, and no one has heard him boast that he "studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts 1898-1903, exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Française 1899, worked with Lalique and Aube 1901," took various prizes, and so forth. What no one knows, outside his immediate friends, with whom he is preternaturally frank, is Lachaise's attitude toward triumphs which would have seduced a mind less curiously and originally sensitive. The fact is that, he regards them with something between amusement and disgust. This is not a question of modesty, but of direct and fearless thinking—at which, as has been already stated, Lachaise is a past master. Of the man who in his twenties has captured beyond question every trick of academical technique we ordinarily expect that he will amuse him-