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Lot Essay
While ostensibly focused on the representation of the female figure, much of Laurens' late work represents an emotional response to the tragic events of World War II. The present work was initially conceived in 1944, just one year before the conclusion of the war. In 1939, the artist had exhibited a series of drawings on the theme of the apocalypse at Pierre Loeb Galerie. During the German occupation of France, Laurens' work was condemned in the French occupation press and the artist was not permitted to exhibit. In works from this period, a mood of grandeur and sobriety replaced the ripe voluptuousness for which he had become renowned in the previous decade.
In Le matin, a kneeling figure struggles to stand upright. In an Atlas-like pose, it literally appears to carry the weight of the world on its shoulders. In its monumentality and in the fullness of its form, the figure brings to mind Picasso's massive Neoclassical figures of the 1920s. The act of rising from the ground to a standing position becomes a symbolic one in Le matin, perhaps representing an homage to France's resistance and cautious sentiments of hope for her recovery from the ravages of war.
The artist was a close friend and contemporary of Alberto Giacometti, who wrote in 1945:
The agreeable feeling produced by the relationship of height and width when seeing one of his works for the first time. The certainty...'This is right once and for all'...For me, Laurens' sculpture, more than any other, really is a projection of the artist himself in space, rather like a three-dimensional shadow. His very way of breathing, of touching, of feeling, of thinking, becomes concrete, becomes sculpture. And his sculpture is complex--real like a glass (I might say 'or like a root' but with less certainty, though in some ways it is closer to a root than to a glass) and, all the while, evoking a re-invented human figure; it is above all the 'double' of what has kept Laurens true to himself all this time. Yet each of these sculptures is also a crystallization of a particular moment of that time. One might think that this holds good for all sculpture, but I do not: at least not in the same way or in the same degree (Alberto Giacometti, "Henri Laurens: un sculpteur vu par un sculpteur," Labyrinthe, no. 4, Geneva, 1945, p. 3).
(fig. 1) Laurens at work on the plaster of Le matin, circa 1944. BARCODE 23659483
In Le matin, a kneeling figure struggles to stand upright. In an Atlas-like pose, it literally appears to carry the weight of the world on its shoulders. In its monumentality and in the fullness of its form, the figure brings to mind Picasso's massive Neoclassical figures of the 1920s. The act of rising from the ground to a standing position becomes a symbolic one in Le matin, perhaps representing an homage to France's resistance and cautious sentiments of hope for her recovery from the ravages of war.
The artist was a close friend and contemporary of Alberto Giacometti, who wrote in 1945:
The agreeable feeling produced by the relationship of height and width when seeing one of his works for the first time. The certainty...'This is right once and for all'...For me, Laurens' sculpture, more than any other, really is a projection of the artist himself in space, rather like a three-dimensional shadow. His very way of breathing, of touching, of feeling, of thinking, becomes concrete, becomes sculpture. And his sculpture is complex--real like a glass (I might say 'or like a root' but with less certainty, though in some ways it is closer to a root than to a glass) and, all the while, evoking a re-invented human figure; it is above all the 'double' of what has kept Laurens true to himself all this time. Yet each of these sculptures is also a crystallization of a particular moment of that time. One might think that this holds good for all sculpture, but I do not: at least not in the same way or in the same degree (Alberto Giacometti, "Henri Laurens: un sculpteur vu par un sculpteur," Labyrinthe, no. 4, Geneva, 1945, p. 3).
(fig. 1) Laurens at work on the plaster of Le matin, circa 1944. BARCODE 23659483