Focus on this artwork and explain the Description.
Groupe de femmes is a plaster sculpture (as many of Csaky's works of the period), carved in a vertical format with unknown dimensions. The work represents three standing nudes, classical in theme (i.e., Les trois graces), yet executed in an abstract stylized Cubist vocabulary, in opposition to the softness and curvilinearity of Nabis, Symbolist or Art Nouveau forms.The dominating central figure is flanked by a woman to her left and another to the right, positioned slightly behind. Two of the women are holding drapery that flows rigidly down to their legs to the base of the sculpture. The figures are constructed with a robust, muscular build, distilled in the form of almost androgynous stature, together forming a tight cohesive mass. The heads and features of the figures, seen in both profile and frontal views, are treated as a series of faceted planar forms that communicated in a strange novel 3-dimensional language; one that at the time broke away from every natural and rational convention.Albert Elsen characterized Csaky's Head sculpture of 1913 in a way that applies to the heads depicted in Groupe de femmes:His Head is a brutal asymmetrical reconstruction of the motif that submerges featural identity by a logic of thrusting planar forms. The result, unlike that of Filla, is the redesigning of the head that is no longer dependent upon a frontal confrontation for the most revealing view, and the consistency of this sculptural context discourages trying to project missing features on the blank planes. The blunt force-fulness with which the head is shaped and thrusts in and out suggests that Csaky had looked not only at Picasso's earlier painting and sculpture, but also at African tribal masks whose exaggerated features and simplified design accommodated the need to be seen at a distance and to evoke strong feeling. (Elsen)
Csaky's heads of the period partake in the "stylized, hieratic, nonportrait tradition of tribal and ancient art", writes Edith Balas, "in which there is a total lack of interest in depicting psychological traits". Csaky's Groupe de femmes and the Head (1913) "are lost sculptures that testify to Csaky's early immersion in cubism".
Nabis Filla Cubist Art Nouveau Symbolist Albert Elsen sculpture