Mirror of the Moderns

French Sculptor Henri Laurens was a self-effacing man who ordinarily preferred to let his articulate friends do the talking. But one night in 1930, as Art Dealer D. H. Kahnweiler recalls it, the conversation drifted around to the beauty of Marlene Dietrich. One of the group suggested that Marlene did not have beautiful thighs. "Too thick," he concluded. With a vehemence that shocked his friends, the mild-mannered Laurens leaped to Marlene's defense.

"Oh, quelles belles grosses cuisses!" he exclaimed. ("What beautiful big thighs!") Laurens, of course, was not merely defending Marlene: he was defending his own conception of sex and soul, a lifelong vision of woman as a beauteous, bursting form. She had entered his hands an inhibited Victorian lady and emerged a delightfully sensuous modern. She was a siren, Dawn, Night, a symbol of all nature's most mysterious forces. Now, in a sweeping retrospective at Paris' Grand Palais com posed of 110 bronzes, plus terra cottas and drawings -- all part of a grand gift from the sculptor's son Claude to the French nation -- every Circean guise and symbolic posture that Laurens' woman assumed over the years is visible.

Cubes & Guitars. The show, in sum, is a mirror of modern French sculp ture. The son of a poor Parisian worker, Laurens began his career, after stud ies with a decorative sculptor, in a rundown house on a dead end Montmartre street. The year was 1911. Cub ism was in full flower, and Georges Braque lived only a few doors away.

Matisse, Picasso, Gris and Leger be came friends and frequent visitors. "The house was always full," remembers Claude. "The others found something warm and calm about it."

Laurens was reserved but receptive to his colleagues' cubist ideas, soon began experimenting with painted geometric sculpture. Eventually the female superseded other subject matter. Since Laurens never used models, he was free to invent: an arm became a jai alai basket, limbs were omitted or dramatically extended. If his early cubist works were all angles, taut as strings, his later ones had the liquid rhythm of the sea. That breakthrough came in 1931, when Laurens visited the Mediterranean seacoast. From then on, his sculpture looked as if it had been tumbled in a million waves rather than shaped by a single incisive hand. Yet, though he abandoned cubism's forms, he continued to use its symbol, a guitar, as an accompaniment to his sirens.

Fame came belatedly, perhaps because of his modest nature. In 1936 he created four reliefs for the Paris world's fair. In 1950, Henri Matisse shared the Venice Biennale's grand prize with Laurens; in 1953, Laurens won the Sao Paulo Bienal's grand prize. He died of a heart attack a year later at the age of 69, and since then, through half a dozen major exhibitions, critics have waxed ever more enthusiastic, calling him the single most important French sculptor of the century. Plans call for the current monumental show to tour abroad for several years before returning home to rest in its own pavilion at Paris' projected Museum of the Twentieth Century.

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