(already reproduced in the January Dial), two reclining figures (Home and Portrait), a diving figure, the colossal Love, and last—and to our thinking best—The Mountain. We have already, in all probability, talked too much and said too little (to use a peculiarly conventional phrase) about The Mountain; yet it is without shame that we are guilty of a parting word, for which Lachaise's infrequently paralleled mastery of stone is wholly responsible. In The Mountain as it appears in this exhibition Lachaise has completely enjoyed an opportunity to work directly in the stone Himself as he calls it. He has enjoyed it as his contemporaries to whom stone is not a tactile dream, but a disagreeable everyday tangible nuisance to be handled by paid subordinates, can never enjoy it. In the transformation from the patined plaster (which was at Penguin and later, unofficially, at the Bourgeois Galleries) to the stone now on view, several vastly minute and- enormously significant changes have occurred—changes dictated purely by the superior medium. To speak accurately, now for the first time The Mountain actualizes the original conception of its creator; who, in contrast to the contemptible conventionally called "sculptor," thinks in stone whenever and because stone is not, and to whom the distinction between say bronze and alabaster is a distinction not between materials but, on the contrary, between ideas. In The Mountain as it IS Lachaise becomes supremely himself, the master of every aspect of a surface, every flexion of a mass, every trillionth of a phenomenon.
The reader who expects an analysis of the other work which we have mentioned as being included in the exhibition (Dusk, Portrait, Love, etc.) is due for a pleasant disappointment. The very good reasons for our not attempting such an analysis (or rather analyses, since, once again— the whole tribe of Defunctives to the contrary—Lachaise's “point of view” never repeats itself) are briefly: first, we do not feel that we are up to the job; second, if this essai means anything whatever it means that the only very great sinners are the Gentleman Dealers In Second-Hand Thoughts. God knows that in the course of the preceding pages we have sinned deeply enough. Rather than despicably to descend into mere praise of an artist who, if only for the reason that we profoundly admire him, does not merit from us a so conventional insult—a man in relation to whose extraordinary achievement praise cannot but constitute a sumptuous impertinence—we prefer to maintain or perhaps to regain silence.
