While still a student, he met and fell in love with an older American woman, Isabel Dutaud Nagle, then followed her after she returned to America.

After briefly working for the master jewelry and glass designer René Lalique in order to pay for his passage, he arrived in America in 1906, never to return to his native land.

[4] In America, Lachaise developed his distinctive style and portrayal of the female nude to convey his views about the world around him and healthy, fulfilling human existence.

[8] In the words of a later critic: "The breasts, the abdomen, the thighs, the buttocks—upon each of these elements the sculptor lavishes a powerful and incisive massiveness, a rounded voluminousness, that answers not to the descriptions of nature but to an ideal prescribed by his own emotions.

In his own words, he characterized some of his very early sculpted images of "Woman" as vigorous and robust, "radiating sex and soul," or in "forceful repose, serene and massive as earth.

"[10] Having both become an American citizen and married Isabel in 1917, Lachaise began his meteoric rise in the New York art world with his first solo show, held in 1918 at the Bourgeois Galleries.

1933, Museum of Modern Art, New York), is perhaps the most complete expression of his principal theme: a voluptuous, energy-filled, self-possessed female nude.

In 1935 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City held a retrospective exhibition of Lachaise's work, the first at that institution for a living American sculptor.

Although one of America's most financially successful sculptors by 1930, largely due to wealthy, discerning patrons, Lachaise burned through most of his income by the time of his unexpected death from acute leukemia on October 18, 1935—at the height of his fame, and having been evicted from his New York studio several weeks earlier because of his failure to pay rent.