Lot 38 Dα

When the French sculptor Henri Laurens met Georges Braque in 1912, the painter passed the ideas and techniques of cubism on to him. After initially trying out this new fragmentation of form on three-dimensional constructions made out of wood, iron and plaster, Laurens turned to the figure around 1920/21, sometimes forming them out of terracotta and sometimes having them cast in bronze.
For “Femme couchée, de face”, he utilised the possibilities offered by the relief to depict a reclining female nude that nearly fills the entire image. Using cubist techniques for the fragmentation of form, he has succeeded in depicting the nude from every side – the head with its long hair is turned to the left, the torso faces towards us and the belly and curve of the buttocks point upwards on a single visual plane. As in the case of Laurens’s still lifes, what interested the artist here is the interplay of the individual forms, which have been geometrised and arranged so that they merge into a single unit. At the same time, there is an alternation between flowing, curvilinear forms and hard-edged, angular elements. When asked about the process behind this, Laurens responded: “When I begin a sculpture, I have only a vague idea of what I wish to make. For example, I have the idea of a woman […].But before my sculpture is a depiction of some thing, it is a sculptural fact, a series of sculptural events in my imagination […]” (cited in “Die unbekannte Sammlung aus Bielefeld”, exh. cat. Bonn 2011, p. 130).
This bronze relief is from the Parisian gallery of Louise Leiris, who took over the representation of Henri Lauren from her father-in-law, Daniel Henry Kahnweiler. The latter had discovered the artist and, looking back, he wrote: “I have pointed out often enough how important Henri Laurens’s work appears to me. His part in the ‘grand epoch’ of cubism can hardly be estimated highly enough” (cited in Werner Hofmann, Henri Laurens, Stuttgart 1970, p. 50).