Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts

Provenance:

Helena Rubenstein, Paris
Parke-Bernet Galleries, Inc., New York, 1966

Recorded:
Marcilhac, Félix. Chana Orloff, Paris: Les Éditions de l’Amateur, 1991, no. 98 (plaster cast), p. 225.
Grossman, Cissy. "Restructuring and Rediscovering a Woman’s Oeuvre: Chana Orloff, Sculptor in the School of Paris," 1910 to 1940, (Doctoral Dissertation of Philosophy in Art History, The City University of New York), Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services, 1998, illus. nos. 127-134, pp. 123-125.

This is a lifetime cast by the artist. The work is accompanied by a photo-certificate of authenticity signed by the artist's granddaughter Ariane Tamir.

Chana Orloff was born in 1888 in the small Ukrainian town of Staro-Konstaninov. One of nine children, she assisted in the support of her family by learning to sew and working as a seamstress. She immigrated with her family to the town of Petah-Tikva, Palestine in 1905. Orloff’s provincial upbringing in the Ukraine and Palestine provided little exposure to visual art, although she was familiar with and attracted to Ukrainian folk art carvings and the decorative objects in her childhood synagogue.

Five years later, she left Palestine for Paris, which at the time was the center of the art world. Upon her arrival, she found work sketching for the fashion houses and enrolled in Marie Vassilieff’s Académie Russe, though the training offered there was extremely casual, with little instruction and no exams. Orloff’s true artistic education came from her immersion in the life of the Parisian avant-garde. Living in Montparnasse, she befriended and worked alongside such artists as Marc Chagall, Jacques Lipchitz, Amadeo Modigliani and Chaim Soutine. She frequented the famed artists’ studios/residences known as La Ruche (The Beehive), and became a habitué of Café Flor and La Coupole. By 1915, she was firmly ensconced as a member of the School of Paris.

Orloff’s early sculptures were carved from wood, the material with which she was most familiar from her childhood. She explored Cubist and African techniques, and from the outset, her art was characterized by smooth surfaces and a lyrical, fluid composition, evoking comparisons to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi and Elie Nadelman, two fellow émigrés working in Paris. While Orloff’s sculptures share certain qualities with both artists (with Brancusi, the streamlining of form and integration of African influences; with Nadelman, references to classical art and an elegant whimsicality), it is indisputably her own. Orloff’s sculptures are marked by a seeming contradiction; her subjects create a delicate, soft impression while simultaneously announcing themselves as substantive objects with a definite weight and form.

Mme X, Femme au Turban exemplifies Orloff’s distinctive style. An anonymous portrait, rather than an idealized head, the sculpture possesses individuated features that evoke a strong sense of the sitter’s personality. Exuding confidence and nobility, the woman closes her eyes and purses her lips in a moment of intense contemplation. Beneath her neatly wrapped turban, two braids peek out. The linear rhythms and textured surface of the fabric draped over her shoulder provide a pleasing contrast to the softly modulated volume of her face. Free of excessive detail, the sculpture is elegant in its simplification.