¤ HENRI LAURENS (1885-1954) NUS COUCHES À LA SPHÈRE Bronze... Lot 1

¤ HENRI LAURENS (1885-1954) NUS COUCHES À LA SPHÈRE Bronze print with brown-black patina Signed with the monogram with the foundryman's stamp 'Alexis Rudier/Fondeur Paris' on the terrace Cast iron made before 1952 after a model designed at the end of the 1920s Bronze with brown-black patina; signed with the artist's monogram and foundry mark on the base Conceived in the late 20's, this bronze version cast during the artist's lifetime and before 1952 TOP. 14.5 CM - 5 11/16 IN. LONG. 37,4 CM - 14 3/4 IN. PROVENANCE Collection Suzanne and Georges Ramié, Vallauris. Then by descent. The woman lying and leaning on her elbow is a favourite theme for Henri Laurens. From 1921 onwards, a few groups composed of two women sometimes holding hands appear. However, they are an exception in the work of the sculptor, who prefers to concentrate on isolated figures. Although the latter initially take up the cubist idea of the subject treated on several sides at once, they then bear witness to a true classicism. Combining with subtlety the rounded and curved forms from the mid-1920s onwards, they led Jacques Bornibus  to say in 1960: "At the very moment when Cubism saw its followers disperse definitively, he [Laurens] gave it a kind of classical synthesis in sculpture". "Laurens' sculpture is for me, more than any other, a true projection of himself in space, a bit like a three-dimensional shadow. His very way of breathing, touching, feeling, thinking, becomes object, becomes sculpture. This sculpture is complexe ; it is as real as glass (I would like to say 'or as a root', I am less sure, although it is in some ways closer to the root than to the glass)  ; at the same time, it reminds us of a reinvented human figure, it is above all the 'double' of what makes Laurens identical to himself through temps ; but each of his sculptures is moreover the crystallization of a particular moment of this time (one might think that this is valid for all sculptures, I don't think so, at least not in the same way or to the same degree). The slightest part of this sculpture has passed and passed through the author's sensibility, becomes like a part of his sensibility itself. Laurens only moves forward in his work with this absolute control and never tries to override it. The dimension, the proportion, the movement of the sculpture is established, clarified and finally determined according to this same deep and complex sensibility." Alberto Giacometti, fragment of an article published in Labyrinthe in janvier 1945, quoted in Henri Laurens, cat. expo, Paris, Galerie Claude Bernard, Paris : 1960, p. 5.