The books and articles below constitute a bibliography of the sources used in the writing of this page. These also suggest some accessible resources for further research, especially ones that can be found and purchased via the internet.
Important Art by Henri Laurens
Head of a Woman (1915)
In Head of a Woman, Laurens demonstrates what is meant by "sculpto-painting", a term used by author and museum director A.M. Hammacher to describe this work and to place Laurens alongside the likes of Cubist sculptor Alexander Archipenko. Laurens's piece made tangible the Analytic Cubist technique of fracturing three-dimensional forms onto a two-dimensional canvas. The artist here flattened composite views of the woman's head as seen from various angles and at various times of day, and used jagged triangular, rectilinear, and curved shapes to indicate the co-presence of these diverse perceptual experiences. Yet, unlike Cubist paintings, Laurens literally worked in three-dimensions with his non-natural sculptural planes translating the impossible experience of simultaneous vision into an actual spatial representation.
The artist also used paint strategically. Reversing aerial perspective, which would relegate darkened colors to the more distant background with lighter, brighter, more visible spaces in the foreground, Laurens painted the back recesses of the woman's eye areas light brown, with black-painted planes composing the contours of her face. White-painted accent triangles suggested the outlines of the woman's nose, and, in another reverse of chiaroscuro, the shadowed recesses of her neck.
L'Instrument de Musique (The Musical Instrument) (1916)
Laurens's Cubist collages and papier collé works closely aligned with the methods and themes of his fellow Cubists, such as Pablo Picasso. Like Picasso, Laurens used Cubist compositional techniques on a narrow range of themes, such as still lifes - in this case, a guitar. Laurens deconstructed the guitar into planar units with overlaid chalk and charcoal drawings indicating the guitar sound hole, strings, outline, as well as its frets. The artist also integrated text with his collage, including the word "musique" as a means to signify auditory experience unable to be captured through visual media.
Unique to Laurens, however, was his maintenance of a coloristic and sculptural sensibility in his collages. Here, the artist played with overlapping black and white planes which at once suggested standard Cubist formal fragmentation, but at the same time reduced chiaroscuro to planar units of light and shade. Color, or, in this case, value, did as much of the compositional "heavy lifting" to suggest three-dimensionality as the tangible pasted papers.
Woman with a Mandolin (1919)
The subject of a woman with a mandolin was a common theme amongst Cubist painters and sculptors. Here, Laurens's sculpture (like Picasso's 1910 Girl with a Mandolin) used a combination of sharp and curved planar units to blur the boundaries between the female subject and the instrument she played.
Woman with a Mandolin in particular invites comparison with works by another notable Cubist sculptor, Jacques Lipchitz. Like Laurens, Lipchitz, in works such as his 1920 Seated Man with Clarinet I literalized the Cubist dissolution of perspectival illusionism, creating layers of angular, geometric forms which suggested the simultaneity of foreground and background space. Yet, unlike Lipchitz's work, Laurens's Woman with a Mandolin is as a more organic (less fragmented) sculpture. Here planar angles build from the ground to an apex with a tapered, bent head, rather than progressed outward as a deliberately sharp sculptural articulation of front and back planes.
Anticipating the curved female forms of his later career, Laurens rendered this woman as almost a fluid, organic outgrowth of the earthenware; with the barest suggestion of hair, head, eyes, and arms. Despite the compositional fragmentation, the woman appeared to emerge naturally from within the material.
More Important Art
Influences and Connections
Influences on Artist
Influenced by Artist
Friends & Personal Connections
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Amedeo Modigliani -
Jacques Lipchitz 
Paco Durrio- Paul Dermée
- Léonce Rosenberg
Movements & Ideas
Artists
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Henry Moore -
Henri Matisse - Baltasar Lobo
- Leonard Baskin
- Marta Colvin Andrade
Friends & Personal Connections
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Jean Cocteau - Amedeo Modigliani
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Juan Gris 
Michel Leiris
Movements & Ideas
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Interwar Classicism 
Modern Sculpture
Useful Resources on Henri Laurens
Books
websites
articles
