La femme à l'éventail

The »Woman with Fan« originates from Laurens’s Cubist period, which began in the 1910s and was succeeded by voluminous organic forms in the 1920s. At this stage, Laurens pursued a simplification and clarification of his formal language in sculptures, reliefs, and collages. Like his friends Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Georges Braque (1882–1963) in their paintings, he began experimenting with basic geometrical forms (cuboids, spheres, etc.) during this period, as this female bust with its frontal orientation clearly shows. The head in particular has a block-like appearance, while the small mouth represented by a notch and the almond-shaped eye lend it a certain elegance. Head, neck and upper chest, hair and fan are formed from abstract, albeit recognizable elements, which combine to form a harmonious whole. For Laurens, however, the aim is not a faithful reproduction of nature. Instead, his female bust can be understood as an attempt to explore basic three-dimensional elements such as the cuboid, along with their relationships to one another and to the viewer, through the medium of sculpture.