Henri Laurens Lot n° 28

Henri Laurens Femme couchée (de face) 1921 Bronze relief 13.7 x 39.2 cm Framed in acrylic glass stand. On the reverse with a fragmented paper label of the Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris. On it handwritten in ink the title and the edition size. One of 8 casts. - With beautiful olive, partly reddish iridescent patina. Provenance Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris, acquired there; since then family property USA Exhibitions Cologne/Krefeld/Hamburg/Basel/Berlin 1955/1956 (Eigelsteintorburg/Kaiser Wilhelm Museum/Kunstverein Hamburg/Kunsthalle/Haus am Waldsee), Henri Laurens, Cat. No. 6; London 1971 (The Arts Council), Sculpture and Drawings by Henri Laurens, p. 39 with ill.; Bielefeld 1972 (Kunsthalle), Henri Laurens. Sculptures, Prints, Drawings, cat. No. 2, p. 24 with ill.; Hanover 1985 (Sprengel Museum), Henri Laurens, cat. No. 3, p. 21 with colour ill. (collection copy); Lugano 1986 (Galleria Pieter Coray), Laurens Cubista, cat. No. 21, p. 70 with ill. Literature Marthe Laurens, Henri Laurens. Sculpteur 1885-1954, Paris 1955, no. IV, p. 95 with ill.; Werner Hofmann, Henri Laurens. Das plastische Werk, New Stuttgart 1970, p. 217, p. 103 with full-page ill. The present relief "Femme couchée (de face)" shows a reclining female nude filling the entire format. The body, broken down into individual geometric forms according to the principles of cubism, is turned towards the viewer in an almost all-viewing manner: the head turned to the left into a lost profile, the breasts and upper body enface, the belly pointing upwards in counter-torsion with the simultaneous appearance of the rounding of the buttocks. The simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is here combined into a space-image continuum. Werner Hofmann, who was an early student of the works of Henri Laurens, directs his dissecting gaze to a head sculpture from 1920, and the insights formulated here are interesting with regard to our relief: "The dissociation, understood not as an expressive violation but as a syntactic new freedom, [...] demonstrates not only the space for variation that the sculptor extracts from the pretext 'head', it also reveals a fundamental law of Cubism. I am thinking of the interpenetration of representational quotations and non-representational signs, the latter appearing in a voice-leading manner and guiding the formal structure. Their ambivalence enables them to assume the function of object references as well." (Werner Hofmann, op. Cit, p. 12). Daniel Henry Kahnweiler, who was forced to give up his Paris gallery in the late 1930s and entrusted it to his sister-in-law Louise Leiris, met Henri Laurens in 1920. Looking back, he describes, "Picasso [had] left Montmartre, but Juan Gris was still living in the Bateau Lavoir, and Braque was living with his wife in the Rue Simon-Dereure. Laurens and he could wave to each other from their windows. [...] I have often enough pointed out how important Henri Laurens' work seems to me. His contribution to the 'great epoch' of Cubism can hardly be overestimated. [...] His development seems to me to be similar to that of his companions Braque, Juan Gris, Picasso." (quoted from: ibid., p. 49 f.).