Henri Laurens

Henri Laurens was born on 18 February 1885 in Paris, and he spent his entire life in that city. He began as a stonemason and decorative sculptor on Parisian building sites, and from about 1899 to 1902 he attended the École d'Art Industriel Bernard Palissy in Paris, studying decorative and ornamental sculpture and architectural drafting. Alongside this training he took evening drawing classes with the sculptor Jacques Perrin, and his earliest independent sculpture showed the influence of Auguste Rodin.

Around 1911 Laurens met Braque, and through him entered the circle of Picasso, Gris, and Fernand Léger. He first exhibited at the Salon des Independants in 1913, and by 1917 he had a solo exhibition at Leonce Rosenberg's Galerie l'Effort Moderne in Paris, signing a contract with the gallery the following year. His Cubist constructions in wood, sheet metal, and painted relief translated the flattened planes of Cubist painting into three dimensions. After the war his work moved toward a fuller, more organic treatment of the female figure, a shift that came to define his mature style.

Laurens contributed substantially to the 1937 Paris World's Fair (the Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne). He had already received the Helena Rubinstein Prize in 1935, which brought renewed attention to his work during the difficult Depression years. In 1938 his work traveled in a joint exhibition with Braque and Picasso through Oslo, Stockholm, and Copenhagen, and in 1939 he was included in the Museum of Modern Art's Art in Our Time in New York. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 1948 and again in 1950, when Matisse, passed over for the sculpture prize that year, voluntarily shared half of his own Grand Prix for painting with Laurens as a gesture of respect. A major retrospective followed at the Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris in 1951. He is also remembered as one of the artists who declined the French Legion of Honor, reportedly for political reasons.

Laurens died in Paris on 5 May 1954, having collapsed from a heart attack on an evening walk. He and his wife are buried in the Cimetiere du Montparnasse in Paris, beneath a tomb reportedly surmounted by a copy of his sculpture L'adieu.

Laurens is generally credited as one of the first sculptors to find, in three dimensions, an equivalent to Cubist painting, a framing used by reference sources including Encyclopedia.com. Sotheby's describes him as a key figure in the Cubist movement who, after the First World War, developed a more organic and rounded style centered on the female form. Writing in The New York Times in 1971, critic John Russell discussed the art historian Werner Hofmann's reading of Laurens's late work, in which fruitfulness recurs as a central, almost mythic theme, a reading that reflects how postwar criticism increasingly framed his sculpture in terms of growth, ripeness, and the body rather than purely formal Cubist analysis.

Laurens's best-documented auction result is La Lune, which sold for USD 2,175,000 at Phillips; the exact sale date and sale location are not confirmed in public sources. A market aggregator, MutualArt, separately cites an even higher realized price of about USD 2,660,433 for an unidentified sculpture, but the work, auction house, and sale date behind that figure could not be verified, so La Lune is presented here as the best-documented result rather than a confirmed all-time high. More recent sales, including a reported USD 1.02 million for Construction (bouteille) in November 2023, have come in well below the La Lune result, consistent with a market where results depend heavily on the specific work rather than a smooth upward trend. His sculptures, drawings, and collages circulate through major auction houses and modern-art dealers, including Landau Fine Art and Helene Bailly Marcilhac, but no single gallery or estate has been documented as his exclusive representative.

There is no confirmed catalogue raisonne for Laurens, so provenance research and specialist review carry more weight than they would for an artist with a fully catalogued oeuvre. His auction market is comparatively thin, with widely spaced high-value results, so a single strong or weak sale can shift perceptions of his market more than it would for an artist who trades more frequently. His institutional standing is well established through holdings at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, Tate, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Centre Pompidou, which is the strongest evidence of his lasting importance, even as the commercial market remains comparatively illiquid.