Laurens, Henri

Henri Laurens was born in Paris in 1885 and attended an artistic drawing class there at the age of 14. In the streets of Montparnasse he met Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Juan Gris as well as Fernand Léger and began to work in the Cubist style from 1915. He constructed fragile-looking figurative sculptures out of painted wood and metal. He used poster paint and collage in his works, was an engraver on the side, and worked as a theater designer, decorator, and graphic designer for architectural projects. Soon the busy artist was regarded as a multi-talented artist.
 

Soon after, he additionally began working with materials such as stone and ceramics to better apply the Cubist principle of analytically fanning out volumes. Laurens continued to receive large decorative commissions for his female natural legories. His work focused on curvaceous-full to imaginatively deformed-curved female nudes. The sculptor's sparse but technically comprehensive print oeuvre testifies once again to his graphic interests.
 

Starting in 1938, Laurens participated with his first works in a group exhibition with greats of the art scene such as Braque and Picasso, which toured Scandinavia. This was soon followed by exhibitions at Louis Carré in Paris and galleries in New York. In between, he devoted himself again and again to printmaking, producing etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts and linocuts for artists' books.
 

In 1948 and 1950 Laurens showed his work at the Venice Biennale, and a year later the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris honored the artist's life's work with a major retrospective. He died in his hometown of Paris in 1954.