Claude-Lévy, 1895 – 1942
Alice Nikitina in the role of Flora, from the Dukelsky/Braque production of the ballet Zephyr & Flore at the Ballets Russes, 1925
Cast Stone
Signed and dated: Claude-Levy 1925 on rear face of self-base.
The present sculpture is as rare as it is delightful. Mademoiselle Claude-Levy, as the
catalogues of the period list her, was one of the truly original talents of the Art Deco period. Painter, architect, decorator, and sculptor, she was a friend of the Parisian, Modernist sculptors, Chana Orloff, Henri Laurens and the Martel brothers, to whom her work was often compared. The ingenuity of her models brought her great critical acclaim, but she seems to have stopped producing in the early 1930s. Her output, although fine, is rare. Claude-Levy’s gentle Cubism might be better described as Purism in sculpture. It is characterized by simplified surfaces, rounded (as opposed to angular) forms, and smooth, lustrous surfaces. The Purist movement included the painters Léger, Ozenfant and Le Corbusier in its ranks.
Claude-Lévy, along with other artists of the avant- garde living in the Gallic capital (Czaky, Zadkine, Archipenko, Lipchitz, Lambert Rucki Miklos, Nadelman, Vörös, Orloff) helped to develop a collective twentieth century figurative sculptural idiom that exploited the daring and rich possibilities of geometric abstraction.
The present work is Claude-Lévy’s Commedia dell’Arte figures inspired by the Stravinsky/Picasso Ballet...
Category
1920s Cast Stone Abstract Sculptures