Page 37 - Studio International - July August 1971

the immediacy and liveliness of the smaller figure sculptors before and after him have done). 3 Arnold Böcklin The Island of the Dead 1880
bronzes, and the ponderous and overworked It is in this naive determination to see through Oil on wood, 74.5 x 122.5 cm.
quality of the more ambitious 'monumental' the consequences of his own development that Coll: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
pieces; between the ambition to make a sculpture we can see the essential Laurens; and there are 4 Arnold Bocklin The Naiads at Play 1886
Oil on canvas, 151 x 176.5 cm.
complete in itself; and as an articulator of sufficient good sculptures in this exhibition from Coll: Offentliche Kunstsammlung, Basel
architecture; all suggest that the slow, fat, the later period to compensate for the general 5 Ferdinand Hodler The Retreat from Marignano 1898
fruit-like Mediterranean nude was a premature misdirection of ambition. That these pieces are Oil on canvas, 321 x 471 cm.
solution, a caricature rather than an identity. nearly all small partly indicates the banality of Coll: Kunsthaus, Zurich
Laurens inevitably suggests a host of his monumental aspirations, but largely the fact 6 Ferdinand Hodler Peak of Niesen 1910
Oil on canvas, 8o x 91 cm.
comparisons: with Lipchitz, whose development that after the cubist period Laurens never found Coll: Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau
runs parallel, but whose sculpture in the cubist a material that would precisely answer his needs. 7 Henri Laurens, Bouteille et Verre 1917
period far excels his own; with Matisse, whose He wanted clay to, and it did on the small scale; Papier collé, 59 x 39.5 cm.
perception of the figure and handling of clay but to revert to Rodin's ambitions for the figure Courtesy: The Arts Council of Great Britain
make Laurens look like a half-blind academician; without Rodin's capacity for modelling (with 8 Henri Laurens L'Océanide 1933
Bronze, 275 x 1 to cm.
with Arp, whose invention in the same area of which in its abstractness he virtually dispensed Courtesy: The Arts Council of Great Britain
form was untramelled by the need to reproduce with the need for the figure) was for Laurens Photo: John Webb, London
the human figure; with Moore, whose handling a dead end, as it has been for Moore and 9 Henri Laurens L' Adieu 1941, Bronze
of similar formal problems he often anticipated, Lipchitz. Courtesy: The Arts Council of Great Britain
Photo: John Webb, London
but whose overall achievement is surely more WILLIAM TUCKER
impressive. It is probably with Maillol that
Laurens should be ranked; he looked to an
idealized, Arcadian past for answers to the issues 7
Cubism had created—the object-nature of
sculpture, and the relation of the new structural
materials to form (Laurens himself had probably
been the first of the Cubists to use sheet steel).
As Matisse said of Maillol, he 'did not love
adventure'.
If Laurens does not come well out of separate
comparison with his major contemporaries, his
effort to re-make the figure after Cubism was in
some ways an act of courage, and deserves a
certain respect. Laurens's own Cubism was a
painter's Cubism: the finest of his constructions,
such as the beautiful Bottle and Glass of 1918,
are still essentially the transposition of a Picasso
synthetic-cubist painting into sculpture, but
preserving the frontal view of the painting and
the layering and angling of the planes relative to
this view. The little terra-cotta reclining and
other figures of the '20s (which seem to me
much better sculptures than generally assumed)
retain this frontality : the masses are flattened
and articulated relative to an imagined plane,
and when seen at a distance the pale biscuit
colour contributes to an atmospheric illusion of
volume that still owes much to the painter's
conception of Cubism. It is only with the
modelled figures of the 'ios that Laurens
achieves a sculptural Cubism, as it had been
understood some 20 years before by Duchamp-
Villon and Lipchitz—that is, the separation,
rationalization and reconstruction of volume.
By the 'ios the clarity and order imposed by
the presence of the object-world (the cubist
still life) and the materials and processes proper
to the making of objects had been removed, and
were replaced for Laurens by traditional figure
motifs. These sculptures are re-invented figures
(as Giacometti points out in the essay published
in the catalogue) rather than equivalents for
visual experience (as with Matisse). But cubist
invention, not only in the articulation of volumes
but in their internal treatment, is tied to a
determination to accommodate all the details of
the figure—not to omit the difficult extremities
in the interest of a unified design (as so many
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