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Gaston Lachaise
French (1882–1935)
Man, modeled 1930–34, cast 1938

Born and trained in Paris, Gaston Lachaise immigrated to the United States in 1906. Around 1920 he began to produce sculptures of heroic male and female nudes. Their sensual, swelling forms and primitive power exerted a formative influence on early 20th-century art, signaling him as a leader of the first generation of America's modernist sculptors.

The monumental (8-½ feet high) bronze Man is among the most famous and influential of Lachaise’s works. Lachaise reinvested modern figure sculpture with a nearly primal solidity and strength, evoking prehistoric images of fertility gods and the classic statuary of the ancient Greeks and Romans.