ABSTRACT
Henri Laurens first encountered Cubism in 1911, the year he met Georges Braque, and the earliest of his Cubist sculptures that have survived date from 1915. The 1920's were, among other things, a period of classical revivals—in Jean Cocteau's phrase, a "call to order"—and this proved to be a historical current completely congenial to Laurens's sensibility. In a fine monograph on Laurens's work published only a few months ago—The Sculpture of Henri Laurens—the Austrian critic Werner Hofmann names "Laurens's great mythic theme" as "fruitfulness." Laurens is one of those artists whose work recalls us to the meaning of sincerity in art. Every move forward is carefully tested in the crucible of the artist's sensibility. The gallery has also borrowed Laurens's "Head" from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art—one of the greatest of his constructions, a work of sheer perfection.
