Background
Henri Laurens was born on February 18, 1885, in Paris, France.
Henri Laurens
Henri Laurens
Georges Braque
Amedeo Modigliani
Pablo Picasso
1916
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Henri Laurens was born on February 18, 1885, in Paris, France.
In 1899 Henri Laurens attended drawing classes in the studio of "Pere Perrin, " where he became lifelong friends with a number of his fellow students.
Henri Laurens entered the workshop of an ornamental sculptor where he modelled figurines and did tracings of architectural decorations. This experience led him to his next occupation as a sculptor of architectural embellishments, often working on the scaffolding of buildings under construction.
In 1911 Laurens met the painter Georges Braque – certainly the most important event in Laurens' career. Braque and his Spanish friend, Pablo Picasso, starting five years earlier, had evolved a revolutionary style, Cubism, based on dual influences of the work of Paul Cezanne and of African sculpture. The faceted strokes of Cezanne and the expressive distortions of African sculpture coalesced into a style in which planes, freed from purely representational connotations, interpenetrated and interlocked as a dynamic surface. Figure and ground, the subject and its environment, unite in a measureless depth.
Art critics and theoreticians, such as Guillaume Apollinaire, interpreted this to convey a new multi-faceted artistic reality. An object and its environment were perceived from many viewpoints, in effect as a totality that divorced the viewer from the Western tradition of illusionism in which the moment and the viewer's location were fixed in time and space. More formal training of Laurens might have inhibited his adoption of this stylistic innovation. In addition, his background as a craftsman concerned with his materials and tools may have facilitated his becoming a Cubist artist.
Through Braque, Laurens met Picasso, Gris, Leger, and other artists associated with Cubism as well as with other revolutionary movements. Initially, Laurens was an artistic disciple of Braque and worked in two-dimensional media, but by 1912 he started to explore the sculptural potentialities of Cubism. The collages of Picasso and Braque plus Picasso's constructions quickly influenced him. Both media were novel in that they employed the principle of assembling materials into two or three-dimensional works of art, in contrast to the traditional definitions of painting and sculpture.
Laurens' constructions are distinctive in that they are extensive, if not entirely, painted. The beauty of their shapes, rhythms, and color has made Laurens' constructions remarkable in a medium that is generally soberer and less colorful and decorative in effect. During this period he even painted his stone sculptures. In the spirit of the artistic revolution of that time, he produced a body of work that combined painting and sculpture.
During the 1920s, following a tendency of the time, Laurens' sculpture evolved from being characterized by the sharp geometric planes of Cubism to a decorative sensuosity of curving lines and massive forms and volumes. Then, as throughout his career, his work remained playfully representational and never became abstract. Appropriate to this stylistic change, there was an increasing preference for the female form in his sculpture.
By the late 1930s his massive, undulating forms had acquired an organic quality suggesting growing or swelling energies; or, in the manner of the English sculptor Henry Moore, it suggested forms evolving with the forces of time and nature. This occurred with the final renunciation of geometric shapes (1938) and the adoption of a more lyrical and poetic tone in his themes and their interpretation.
Laurens' success, recognition, and financial reward were never great until the last years of his life. During World War I Leonce Rosenberg became his art dealer, followed by Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler. They were two of the most respected dealers in avant-garde art.
Laurens illustrated nine books over the period 1917 to 1953, among which were Paul Eluard's The Last Night (1942) and Tristan Tsara's Entre Temps (1946). In 1924 he did the stage settings for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes' performance of Darius Milhoud's The Blue Train. As he had lived, Laurens died quietly in 1954.
Laurens distinguished himself as one of France's most outstanding sculptors of modern times. His polychromed reliefs of 1919 to 1920 are considered some of the best examples of Cubist sculpture. His inclusion in a major New York art exhibit, "Cubism and Abstract Art, " in 1936 clearly established his place in the development of modern sculpture and his place in the history of art. In 1937 two of his high relief sandstone panels were displayed in the Sevres Pavilion at the Exposition Internationale in Paris.
Laurens’ greatest triumph was winning the Grand Prize at the Sao Paulo Bienal in 1953. He was posthumously honored in many retrospective shows as an artist of importance and as a pivotal figure in the development of modern sculpture.
His works are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others.
La bouteille
1916Head of a Boxer
1920La Dormeuse
1943L'Amphion
1952Seated Woman
1930Composition
1916Head of a Woman
Seated Woman
1926Standing Female Nude (Femme nue debout)
1921Eventide
1935Femme étendue
1936Les Ondines
1934Figura
1929Untitled (from Dialogues)
Bather (fragment)
1931Bottle and Glass
1917Head of a Young Girl
1920Sirene
1938Woman with Drapery
1928Le grand adieu
1941Femme à L'Oiseau
1922Femme au compotier
1920Autumn
1948Man with Pipe
1919Guitar
1920La guitar rose
1918Man with Clarinet
1919Femme allongée au bras levé
1950Untitled (from Dialogues)
L'Aurore
1944Valencia
1927Compote Dish and Guitar
1927La Grande Musicienne
1937Henri Laurens was a kind and patient person who lived quite modestly.
