Claude Levy
1895-1942

Claude-Levy was one of the truly original talents of the Art Deco period. A friend of the modernist sculptor Chana Orloff, to whom her work was often compared, the ingenuity of Claude-Levy’s models brought her critical acclaim. In spite of it, she seems to have stopped producing in the early 1930s, and her output is very rare.  Claude-Levy’s cubism is based more on rounded forms than angular ones.  The smooth, lustrous surface and jet-black patina of the present bronzes cause them to appear as though they have been sculpted in Belgian marble.

Claude-Levy, along with other artists of the avant-garde living in Paris (many of whom were of Jewish extraction: Czaky, Zadkine, Lambert Rucki Miklos, Nadelman, Voros, Orloff) helped, collectively, to develop a twentieth-century figurative sculptural idiom which exploited the rich possibilities of geometric abstraction.