Germaine Richier
French, 1902-1959
Le Feuille, 1948
bronze
55 x 13 x 7 1/2 in.
SBMA, Bequest of Wright S. Ludington
1993.1.38
Richie photographed by Ida Kar, vintage bromide print, 1954
"Hers is a human image challenged, battered, ruined, and still obstinately human"
David Sylvester wrote of Richier's 1955 solo exhibition at London's Hanover Gallery. (Considine, 2014)
Whereas Richier's early works still reflected the influence of Bourdelle and Rodin, she developed her own characteristic figure type in 1940, partly human and partly animal, which was often caught in a web of wires. "My figures are original beings. Original and independent - that's what sculpture should be for me" Germaine Richier said.
RESEARCH PAPER
The sculpture presents a skinny and elongated form of a female’s body. Her face is halved and has no expression. Her hands and legs are lengthened and misshapen, yet her spine, is strong and tall, while in an a-symmetrical form. The leg’s position is deformed, and the sculpture’s stance is imbalanced. The texture is a rugged bronze with hollows and cavities as if with scars and scabs, leaves and plants are “imprinted” on the body. The color is of darker tones of green, not polished, and does not reflect light. The sculpture is compact and stationary as if rooted in the ground, yet the negative space between the legs and around the hands creates a feeling of surrealistic “floating.”- this duality of expressions is subconscious at first glance and intriguing upon deeper observation.
This combination of form and texture creates a troubling emotional expression. It gives the appearance of a distorted distressed human figure, as if it came out of a horror movie, like “walking dead.” Through the use of artistic elements such as form and texture, the French female artist, Germaine Richier, succeeded in arising the spectator’s emotions and expressing the physical and emotional trauma of war through the medium of bronze sculpture. This style of work would be considered the “emotive style”.
This piece is cast bronze darkly tarnished. The technique of deliberately creating holes and cavities in the sculpture and “imprinting” leaves and parts of plants on the surface of the sculpture was used.
Since Richier died at the early age of 57 (1959) and did not leave a written interpretation of her work, we can only speculate on the meaning of her art. Some can understand the sculpture “La Feuille - The Leaf” to be an expression of the aftermath of the wars and its impact on humanity.
This could be the mythical Eve, the mother of humanity, battered and deformed yet still standing! The ‘leaf’ could be an expression of the decay of the human body yet the defiance of the spirit.
Some connect the sculpture to the myth of Daphne’s transformation into a Laurel tree and thus surviving Apollo’s unwanted romance. We can only speculate, that “the leaf” combines fragility and death together with the defiance of the human spirit. As if to say “ they can break my bones and limbs, but cannot break my spirit.”
Germaine Richier (1902–1959) was born in Grans in 1902. The artist studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, at the studio of renowned bust-maker Louis-Jacques Guigues, and with the Rodin-trained bronze expert Antoine Bourdelle. Although Richer was trained classically, usually sculpting from a live model, and remained loyal to the traditional medium of bronze, she also experimented extensively in her work. Her early sculptures included characteristics of both humans and animals in a single piece, and after the Second World War, her emotive figures began to look significantly more wretched and deformed.
In 1936, Richier won the Prix Blumenthal. She exhibited extensively during her lifetime, including five times at the Venice Biennale and at museums such as the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
The artist’s flourishing career was tragically truncated when she died of cancer in 1959. During World War II, Richier and her first husband were able to sit out the war in natural Swaziland. After the war, in 1946, Richier returned to Paris and joined the post-war avant garde group of artists together with Picasso and Alberto Giacometti. These artists were interested in exploring the human condition, especially in light of the trauma of the war. Along with her contemporary, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti, with whom she was frequently compared, Richier explored the new image of humanity in an era freighted with continued privation and existentialist angst. (Ferris, 2016)
After her death, venues worldwide such as the Kunsthalle Mannheim, in Germany, the Kunstmuseum Berne, in Switzerland, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, in Copenhagen, Denmark, have continued to showcase her extensive oeuvre. (Le’vy Gorvay, 2023)
Richier was a student of Antoine Bourdelle and studied together with Alberto Giacometti, one of the great sculptors of the 20th century. Both were influenced by the artistic styles of Surrealism and Naturalism. Richier too is considered a seminal postwar figure in Modern Art.
Her iconic style is Abstract Expressionism or Existential Art which is a post–World War II art movement in American painting, developed in New York City in the 1940s. They often use degrees of abstraction, i.e., they depict forms unrealistically or, at the extreme end, forms not drawn from the visible world (nonobjective) to evoke expressive qualities such as sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism. (Britannica, 2023)
The aftermath of the First and Second World Wars arose philosophical questions about the human condition, as well as existential anguish. Her style became less figurative and more abstract after World War II. The bodily deformations that she experimented with became more emphasized in an attempt to convey a greater sense of agony and trauma. Richier’s use of grafting natural forms into clay figures to produce hybrid plant-animal personages seeks to reveal the instinctive nature of the ever-shape-shifting inner self. (Carbone, 2014)
Furthermore, art professor Anna Swinbourne says that Richier exhibits a “Catholic fixation on the flesh” which resulted from Richier's visit to Pompeii in 1935. Her sculptural textures resemble those of the charred and lava-caked bodies at that site. But within this anxiety lies a struggle to outstrip the limits of the flesh. (Considine, 2014)
Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Belle Michael, February, 2023
Bibliography
Britannica, "Abstract Expressionism". Encyclopedia Britannica, 27 Jan. 2023
https://www.britannica.com/art/Abstract-Expressionism.
Carbone David,| “Germaine Richier: The Return of a Shape Shifter”. Culture Catch Art Review, June 6, 2014
https://levygorvylive.wpenginepowered.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014_06_06_ReturnOfAShapeShifter_CultureCatch.pdf
Considine Austin, “Germaine Richier at Dominique Lévy and Galerie Perrotin”. Art in America, New York, May 07, 2014
https://levygorvylive.wpenginepowered.com/wp-
content/uploads/2014_05_07_Germaine_Richier_ArtinAmerica.pdf
Ferris Natalie, “Germaine Richier”. Tate Modern, September 1, 2016
https://levygorvylive.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/20160901_Germaine_Richier_TateEtc.pdf
Le’vy Gorvay Galery, “Germaine Richier”, 2023
https://www.levygorvy.com/artist/germaine-richier/
Plagens, “Without a Drop of Irony”. Wall Street Journal online, March 5, 2014
https://levygorvylive.wpenginepowered.com/wp-content/uploads/2014_03_05_WithoutADropOfIrony_WSJ.pdf
POSTSCRIPT
NEW YORK — The auction market is booming and, when it comes to contemporary art, it is charging on at an accelerated pace, as it did before the financial turmoil broke out in the autumn of 2008.
This week, those attending Christie’s and Sotheby’s evening sessions traditionally reserved for the most important works might have briefly thought that there never was a recession. No awareness of it appeared to linger in the bidders’ minds as they ran up paintings, drawings and sundry three-dimensional works to three times the estimate, or more.
The second record price went to the French sculptor Germaine Richier who is well known within a circle of specialists, but hardly rated as a celebrity. “La Feuille” (The Leaf) is the title of a rugged female figure cast around 1950. The severe stylization which distorts the human body and the dark brown surface make the record price, $842,500, particularly noteworthy.
- Souren Melikiannov, The New York Times, 2009
Richier in her studio 1955
COMMENTS
Taking the visitor up to the post-war period, the reflection of internal force in external form is rendered with poignancy in Germaine Richier’s La Feuille (1948). Imagining considers the body as a vehicle for artists to explore their identity and communicate their personal fantasies and emotions, or to convey an artist’s unique response to humanity and our place in the world. Richier belonged to a generation of post-war figure sculptors whose work drastically broke from the classical ideal of the human body as a unified and balanced whole. La Feuille is one of a series of works with which Richier explores the harrowing psychological impact of war. Here, the internal obliterates the external, effacing even the barest marker of the individual. We are left with the resemblance of a human figure that is scarred, indented and marked from mental suffering. Impressed onto the surface of the bronze are overlapping leaf imprints that communicate the human body’s organic and inherently vulnerable nature. Yet Richier also imbues a sense of hope in this fractured figure with the gesture of the reaching fingers that still seek to grasp and hold on, conveying Richier’s understanding of the human body as at once both fragile and resilient.
3rd-dimensionpmsa.org.uk
Germaine Richier was born in Grans, Bouches-du-Rhône, France, on September 16, 1902. After six years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier, she moved to Paris in 1926, where she studied privately with Antoine Bourdelle from 1927 to 1929. Her first solo exhibition was held at the Galerie Max Kaganovitch in Paris in 1934. Richier was granted a sculpture prize in 1936 by the Blumenthal Foundation in New York and in 1937 took part in the Paris World’s Fair, where she received an award. Also in 1937 she participated in an exhibition of European women artists at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in Paris. Richier showed with Pierre Bonnard, Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Robert Delaunay, André Derain, Jacques Lipchitz, and others in the French Pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.
Richier lived primarily in Switzerland and Provence during World War II. In Switzerland she exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in 1942 and shared an exhibition with Arnold d’Altri, Marino Marini, and Fritz Wotruba, at the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1944. After her return to Paris in 1946 she developed her metamorphic imagery. She became increasingly well-known after the war and during the late 1940s and the 1950s exhibited widely in the United States and Europe. Her work was represented at the Venice Biennale in 1948, 1952, and 1954. In 1948 she exhibited with Jean Arp and Henri Laurens at the Galerie d’Art Moderne in Basel and was given an important solo show at the Galerie Maeght in Paris. She executed a Crucifixion for the church of Assy in 1950. Richier was awarded a sculpture prize in 1951 at the São Paulo Bienal. Following an important retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris in 1956, she settled again in Provence. The next year her first solo show in New York took place at the Martha Jackson Gallery. In 1958 Richier participated in group exhibitions at the Kunsthalle Bern and the Musée Rodin, Paris, and was given her first solo presentation in an American museum at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Germaine Richier died on July 31, 1959 while preparing an exhibition at the "Musée Picasso" in Antibes. After hear death the artist's work fell into oblivion. In 1997 the Berlin art academy dedicated a large retrospective to her, which was the first in Germany.
www.germaine--richier.com
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
Richier trained with two of Rodin’s students: Louis-Jacques Guiges, formerly a studio assistant to the master, and Rodin’s star pupil, Antoine Bourdelle. At Bourdelle’s studio, she crossed paths with the better-known Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who was her exact contemporary. Not unlike Giacometti, Richier explored the expressive power of the emaciated human form, which, in these years, inevitably elicited memories of the ravaged bodies that were so savagely recorded in documentary photographs and films of the devastation wrecked by the World Wars. Richier’s half- woman, half-tree figure reflects this sentiment and recalls, in condensed form, the Ovidian tale of the nymph Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s unwanted advances when her father, a river god, transforms her into a laurel tree. The pitted bronze surface, complete with incised leaves and bark- like skin, appears to be in a state of decay, while her painfully attenuated limbs bear a weightless fragility.
- Rodin and his Legacy, 2017