Perhaps it should be stated that one "critic," instead of mentioning The Elevation by name, presented the world with a synopsis of what he, she or it is pleased to call "modernism."
"One regrets that an artist so evidently serious in his aims should sacrifice too often to the extraordinary cult of ugliness which seems to have taken the place of beauty on the altars of 'modernism' à outrance. Strength, power, individuality, all of these qualities, must be conceded to Mr. Lachaise, but the tendency to emphasize and glorify the unsightly because it is supposed to represent force and have some deep symbolic meaning, can only lead to the apotheosis of ugliness, a consummation scarcely to be desired, even by the most ardent exponents of modernism."
The reason why all official and unofficial "criticism" OF The Elevation fails, and fails so obviously as in the specimens quoted, is this: The Elevation is not a noun, not a "modern statue," not a statue OF Something or Some One BY a man named Gaston Lachaise—but a complete tactile self-orchestration, a magnificently conjugating largeness, an IS. The Elevation may not be declined; it should not and cannot be seen; it must be heard: heard as a super-Wagnerian poem of flesh, a gracefully colossal music. In mistaking The Elevation for a noun the "critics" did something superhumanly asinine. In creating The Elevation as a verb Lachaise equalled the dreams of the very great artists of all time.
On the ground that it leads us to a consideration of Lachaise's new show at the Bourgeois Galleries, which event is after all the excuse for this article, we ask the reader's pardon for boring him with a final specimen of "criticism." The author is a distinctly official "critic," Mr. Guy Pène du Bois of the Evening Post, of whom it may fairly be said that he succeeds in taking himself more seriously than all the other members of his very defunct profession put together. He is speaking of the exhibition of American sculptures before mentioned.
"Indeed, in the instance of many of these exhibits, when one has said that they are amusing, full credit has been done to their creators. This is entirely true neither in the instance of Lachaise nor of Diederich. It is true that they are of the ultra-fashionables of
