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Lot n° 38

Henri Laurens

Estimate :
30 000 - 35 000 EUR

Henri Laurens Femme couchée (de face) 1921 Bronze relief. 14 x 39.6 cm. Unmarked. One of 8 casts. - With beautiful dark patina, partly lightened to bronze. Hofmann 103 Provenance Galerie Louise Leiris, Paris (with enclosed document); Galerie René Ziegler, Zurich (1986); private collection, Hesse Exhibitions Lugano 1986 (Pieter Coray Gallery), Henri Laurens cubista, cat. No. 21, with color illus. Literature Cf. Marthe Laurens, Henri Laurens. Sculpteur 1885-1954, Paris 1955, no. IV, p. 95, with illus.; Henri Laurens, exhib. Cat. Haus am Waldsee, Berlin 1956, cat. No. 6; Henri Laurens. Sculptures, Graphics, Drawings, exhib. Cat. Kunsthalle Bielefeld 1972, cat. No. 4; Henri Laurens (1885-1954). Sculptures, collages, drawings, watercolors, prints, exhib. Cat. Sprengel Museum, Hanover 1985, cat. No. 3 When the French sculptor Henri Laurens met Georges Braque in 1912, the latter introduced him to the ideas and techniques of Cubism. After Laurens had initially tried out the new form decomposition on sculptural constructions made of wood, iron and plaster, he turned to the figure around 1920, which he molded partly from terracotta and partly cast in bronze. For the "Femme couchée, de face", he used the possibilities of the relief to depict a reclining female nude almost full-size. Using the means of cubist form decomposition, he succeeded in showing the nude from all angles - the head with long hair turned to the left, the upper body en face and the belly and round buttocks pointing upwards in one picture plane. As with the still lifes, Laurens was concerned here with the interplay of the individual forms, which are geometrized and merged into a single unit. Curved forms alternate with sharp-edged, angular elements. When asked about his approach, Laurens replied: "When I start a sculpture, I only have a vague idea of what I want to do. For example, I have the idea of a woman [...]. But before my sculpture is a representation of anything, it is [...] a sequence of plastic events in my imagination [...]." (quoted from "Die unbekannte Sammlung aus Bielefeld", exhib. Cat. Bonn 2011, p. 130). The bronze relief comes from the gallery of Louise Leiris in Paris, who had taken over the artistic representation of the sculptor from her brother-in-law Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. The latter had discovered Laurens and wrote in retrospect: "I have often pointed out how important Henri Laurens' work seems to me. His contribution to the 'great epoch' of Cubism can hardly be overestimated." (quoted from Werner Hofmann, Henri Laurens, Stuttgart 1970, p. 50).

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