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2 The sculptures, paintings and drawings of Baltasar Lobo have long been admired in his native Spain, his adopted France, and in the many other countries where they grace important collections. Best known are his sculptures, cast in bronze or carved from stone, which translate natural and predominantly human motifs into a distinctive idiom of intensified forms. Exploring the complex relationship between figuration and abstraction with seemingly effortless grace, these works stemmed from his sustained and rigorous engagement with form and material. Born in 1910 in the province of Zamora in north-western Spain, the son of a carpenter, Lobo made his first wooden carvings as a child. Though his talent was recognised early on by art institutions, he largely eschewed formal academic tuition. His sculpting career began in earnest when, after fighting for the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, he settled in Paris in 1939 and joined its artistic community. Pablo Picasso and Henri Laurens offered Lobo practical help in the early years; even more crucially, they instilled in him the confidence to hone his own style. Years of intense, focused work led him to develop the lyrical vocabulary of curvilinear forms for which he is internationally renowned today. 1 The heritage of Spain and the experimentation of the Parisian avant-garde both permeate Lobo's work. The stylised human forms of Sur la Plage, 2e état and L'île du levant evoke pre-classical Iberian sculpture, as too does Jeune fille assise, mains croisées, with its gently stippled marble surface and its exquisitely textured hair, tied neatly and gracing its back with a curve of waves that echo the entire figure's rhythm of arcs. These works are exemplary in their restraint and ageless in their treatment of form: facial features are elided and elegant lines suggest limbs folded snugly against the body. Radically divergent degrees of stylisation and abstraction characterise Lobo's treatment of the female form. Femme avec queue de cheval and Femme mains au dos continue a centuries-old artistic tradition of depicting the female nude, but both celebrate the body as a flowing series of undulations. Danseuse, sur socle unmistakably derives from the human form, but through elegant distortion and nimble attenuation it becomes essentially a metaphor expressing the beauty of dance. Other works hover tantalisingly close to pure abstraction. Face au vent intertwines elements of a human figure and abstract billowing forms; this sculpture and Brise retain a vestigial trace of the human profile in their verticality and poise, but also possess the characteristics of botanical forms such as buds captured as they emerge from a branch. Like Jean Arp's biomorphic sculptures, these work suggest natural processes, but without imitating the outer appearance of natural forms. In them we find an echo of Arp's words, 'Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb'. 2 The extraordinary depth and range of Lobo's approach to form finds an eloquent illustration in his sculptural interpretations of the human torso. In works such as Torse à genoux he explores the suggestive potential of the partial figure. This practice recalls the fragments of Greco-Roman antiquity, but also Rodin, who championed the partial figure as a sculptural form in its own right. In Rodin's words, 'an artist has to apply himself to giving as much expression B A L T A S A R L O B O S C U L P T I N G T H E E S S E N C E O F F O R M