La Chevelure

With its sensuous, flowing contours and richly modeled volumes, La Chevelure exemplifies Henri Laurens’s mature sculptural language of the post-war period. Conceived in 1946, the present work belongs to a moment when the artist had fully moved beyond the angular vocabulary of Cubism to embrace a more organic, biomorphic treatment of the female form, characterized by a harmonious balance between structure and sensuality.
The seated nude, her limbs gathered and her arms arched above her head, unfolds in a continuous rhythm of swelling, rounded forms. Laurens constructs the figure not as an assemblage of discrete parts, but as a unified, self-contained volume, in which each curve leads fluidly into the next. This emphasis on sculptural fullness reflects the artist’s pursuit of what he described as a “ripeness of form,” seeking to create figures imbued with a sense of calm monumentality and tactile presence.
The motif of raised arms, long associated with classical and archaic representations of the female body, situates the work within a broader post-war “return to order,” when many artists revisited the enduring ideals of antiquity. Yet Laurens’s interpretation remains distinctly modern: the anatomy is simplified and stylized, the surfaces gently faceted, and the volumes subtly abstracted, resulting in a figure that is both timeless and resolutely contemporary.