Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, August 23, 2023: Henry Laurens, a French sculptor (cubist) (#1886)

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Artist of the Day, August 23, 2023: Henry Laurens, a French sculptor (cubist) (#1886)

Henry Laurens indulged in a wide range of artistic practices but is most readily associated with the pre-war Cubists. After the war, he would come to see the movement's focus on geometric planes as too dogmatic and his body of work acceded more and more the formal and thematic influences of Classical sculpture. He would move away from the sharp-edged fragmentation of Cubism to experiment with more organic, curved shapes which he matched to mythical subject matter. This initiative can be seen historically as part of a wider post-war project to bring about societal stability through a more accessible aesthetic approach. His curved forms, which were an extension of, rather than a rupture with, high modernism, fitted with the artist's radical politics which he believed would be better served by a less-aggressive, more agreeable, form of avant-gardism.

Laurens's papier collé works saw him linked to fellow Cubists Picasso, Braque and Juan Gris. Laurens, however, synthesized their ideas by applying a coloristic and sculptural dimension to his collages. Like his colleagues, Laurens experimented with overlapping planes and formal fragmentation, but he employed color, not as an independent picture entity, by rather as a means of stressing the three-dimensionality of his collage.

Moving into the inter-war years - the period that became known as the "new order" - Laurens's sculptures reduced in their geometric complexity, becoming less fragmented and more unified. What became known as Interwar Classicism challenged the belief that modern art was all about progress and innovation. Though many modernists came to be view it as mere nostalgia, some artists, including Laurens, sought to bring elements of classicism and modernism into a new relationship. His female busts, for instance, do not conceal their debt to African masks or the female faces of his friend Amedeo Modigliani, but they are unique in terms of their kinship with archaic Cycladic sculptures.

Laurens's interest in curvilinear Cycladic sculpture extended to full-bodied works such as those representing Venus, the Grecian goddess of love. His sculptures were nothing short of radical reinventions; effectively turning the archaic model "inside-out" by featuring (rather than concealing) the stone mass from which the figure was sculpted.

Laurens illustrated numerous texts and books of poetry. His illustrations, including woodcuts of reclining nudes, carried the influence of Henri Matisse's "cut-outs" and Pablo Picasso's continuous line drawings, but his "liquid" curvilinear bodies owed just as much to the Surrealist technique of automatic drawing and the curved planes of Joan Miró and Hans Arp. His illustrations brought further confirmation that Laurens was an artist who was almost impossible to pigeon-hole.

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