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拍品专文
Monsieur Quentin Laurens, holder of the droit morale for the work of Henri Laurens, has kindly confirmed this work is registered in his archives.
An elegant representation of the female form executed in terracotta and presented in its original frame designed by the artist, Tête de femme is a masterful example of Henri Laurens' synthesis of painting and sculpture in polychromatic low relief. Referred to as 'sculpto-peintures' by Alexander Archipenko, low reliefs became popular amongst other innovative Cubist sculptors during this period. Although Laurens had received both sculptural instruction and training in the applied arts, his low reliefs, which deploy an essentially pictorial, as opposed to a sculptural vocabulary, were a development of his Cubist works in the medium of collage. In Tête de femme, this is particularly apparent in the division of the relief into geometric planes onto which paint has been applied in imitation of the appearance of papiers collés. Indeed, Tête de femme bears a close formal resemblance to another Tête de femme, a collage executed in the same year as the present work and now in the collection of the Musée national d'Art moderne in Paris.
In 1918 Laurens began to explore the representation of the female form in a range of media. The female figure subsequently became an abiding concern for the artist and, as such, an early work like Tête de femme becomes all the more important. Tête de femme is not a portrait per se, but more a generalised study composed of asymmetrically arranged elementary forms. Divided into two trapezoids by a bisecting line running the length of the relief, Laurens presents us with views of a woman's profile. The economical use of rhyming shapes, forms and colours gives this work a harmony and purity redolent of classical sculpture but through a thoroughly modern pictorial language.
The process of 'polychroming' was central to Laurens' sculpture at this time: 'I wanted to repress the effects of the variation of light. for me, "polychroming" means that the sculpture has its own interior light' (Laurens, quoted in Henri Laurens, exh. cat., Rome, 1980, p. 47). That Romanesque and Gothic sculpture and reliefs from antiquity - which Laurens was deeply interested in - were often treated polychromatically perhaps also accounts for Laurens use of this technique. The very year Tête de femme was executed, Laurens had spent a number of months in Chartres where he had been inspired by the celebrated medieval sculpture of the cathedral there. As a consummate craftsman from a family of artisans, the inherent qualities of the material were also of great importance to Laurens and certainly the skill with which he handles the terracotta in Tête de femme is evidence of this meticulous attention to the medium. The restrained palette of matt black, light grey and beige in Tête de femme is lent a sense of warmth by the natural, earthy terracotta itself. Georges Braque remarked that, as a sculptor, Laurens worked with great mastery and sensitivity, qualities which are in evidence in this superb terracotta low relief.
An elegant representation of the female form executed in terracotta and presented in its original frame designed by the artist, Tête de femme is a masterful example of Henri Laurens' synthesis of painting and sculpture in polychromatic low relief. Referred to as 'sculpto-peintures' by Alexander Archipenko, low reliefs became popular amongst other innovative Cubist sculptors during this period. Although Laurens had received both sculptural instruction and training in the applied arts, his low reliefs, which deploy an essentially pictorial, as opposed to a sculptural vocabulary, were a development of his Cubist works in the medium of collage. In Tête de femme, this is particularly apparent in the division of the relief into geometric planes onto which paint has been applied in imitation of the appearance of papiers collés. Indeed, Tête de femme bears a close formal resemblance to another Tête de femme, a collage executed in the same year as the present work and now in the collection of the Musée national d'Art moderne in Paris.
In 1918 Laurens began to explore the representation of the female form in a range of media. The female figure subsequently became an abiding concern for the artist and, as such, an early work like Tête de femme becomes all the more important. Tête de femme is not a portrait per se, but more a generalised study composed of asymmetrically arranged elementary forms. Divided into two trapezoids by a bisecting line running the length of the relief, Laurens presents us with views of a woman's profile. The economical use of rhyming shapes, forms and colours gives this work a harmony and purity redolent of classical sculpture but through a thoroughly modern pictorial language.
The process of 'polychroming' was central to Laurens' sculpture at this time: 'I wanted to repress the effects of the variation of light. for me, "polychroming" means that the sculpture has its own interior light' (Laurens, quoted in Henri Laurens, exh. cat., Rome, 1980, p. 47). That Romanesque and Gothic sculpture and reliefs from antiquity - which Laurens was deeply interested in - were often treated polychromatically perhaps also accounts for Laurens use of this technique. The very year Tête de femme was executed, Laurens had spent a number of months in Chartres where he had been inspired by the celebrated medieval sculpture of the cathedral there. As a consummate craftsman from a family of artisans, the inherent qualities of the material were also of great importance to Laurens and certainly the skill with which he handles the terracotta in Tête de femme is evidence of this meticulous attention to the medium. The restrained palette of matt black, light grey and beige in Tête de femme is lent a sense of warmth by the natural, earthy terracotta itself. Georges Braque remarked that, as a sculptor, Laurens worked with great mastery and sensitivity, qualities which are in evidence in this superb terracotta low relief.