Good-Natured Frenchman

Paris' Museum of Modern Art was as full of cheerful curves as a tank of porpoises. Reason: a big show of the ballooning sculptures of 66-year-old French Sculptor Henri Laurens. Laurens, a sculptor in a generation noted mainly for its painters, is little known outside his own set, which includes School-of-Paris Veterans Picasso, Braque and Leger. But his big bulging nudes last week earned him plaudits from critics as the greatest of living French sculptors.

Laurens had waited a long time for such cheers. The son of a Parisian day laborer, he apprenticed himself to a stone carver at 14, attended free sculpture classes in public night school. Before World War I, he took a studio in Montmartre, began hobnobbing with Paris' artist-revolutionaries, translating their cubist experiments into blocky, three-dimensional breakdowns of guitars, women and bottles. But as Laurens' friend, Cubist Andre Lhote, puts it, "The painters had the luck--the bourgeoisie liked the colors. But the poor sculptors! The women were afraid the corners would catch the plumes in their hats." Few prospective buyers took notice of Laurens' experiments in wood and stone. In the '20s, Laurens began smoothing his angles and swelling his planes into ripe curves. "I felt I was drying out," he explains. "I wanted something more sensual. I wanted to do the things that laugh, above all what there is in a truly feminine woman. Cubism was too strict. I wanted to humanize." Trips to the Brittany sea-coast increased his affection for billowing curves. Sitting on the beach he decided, "The sea has a good thumb. It molds everything. Much came of watching the sea, the fish, the women on the beach, the green things and water grass."

Getting the friendly curves of sea and bathers into his work seemed to do little to increase Laurens' popularity. While his friends issued manifestoes, wrangled and sold their boldest experiments on a booming art market, Laurens worked quietly, and his sculpture piled up in the shady garden of his house outside Paris.

Brought in from the garden for the show, Laurens' curvy nudes looked rather like stones worn by the sea's, thumb into bland symbols for human flesh and frame. His figures were perfectly innocent of erotic detail, had none of the heavy grossness of an Epstein. They just showed a good-natured man's happy eye, a sculptor's firm hand.

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