La Montagne (The Mountain) by Gaston Lachaise at the Tramway Plaza

Gaston Lachaise's sculpture, "La Montagne (The Mountain)" is currently on exhibit at the Tramway Plaza. La Montagne (The Mountain) was modeled in 1934 by American Modernist sculptor Gaston Lachaise (1882-1935). The sculpture is the culmination of a series begun in 1913 by Lachaise in New York, where he lived and worked from 1912 until his death in 1935. The work represents at once a landscape and the figure of Isabel Dutaud Nagle, the artist’s muse, model and eventual wife. Lachaise envisioned a piece that was “great and solemn.” He later admitted, “You may say the model is my wife. It is a large, generous figure of great placidity, great tranquility.” Some recognize in Lachaise a revival of the feminine ideal that had flourished for centuries in the voluptuous stone carvings on Hindu temples. Lachaise’s wife inspired virtually all of Lachaise’s sculptures of the female form. “You are the Goddess I seek to express in all my work,” he wrote to her in 1915-16. (Information from the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation). 

The exhibition runs through April 1, 2012. The Tramway Plaza is located on Second Avenue, between 59th and 60th Streets.