Germaine Richier
Germaine Richier (born September 16, 1902 in Grans near Arles , France , † July 31, 1959 in Montpellier , France) was a French sculptor and graphic artist . Her work is one of the most important contributions in the modern tradition of sculpture.
Life
Origin and education
Germaine Etienette Charlotte Richier grew up as the daughter of a winemaking family. Against the wishes of her parents, she began studying sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier with Louis Jacques Guigues in 1921 . In 1926 she moved to Paris and studied until 1929 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in the studio of Émile-Antoine Bourdelle , a student of Auguste Rodin . After completing her training, she set up her own studio in Paris and married the Swiss sculptor Otto Charles Bänninger .
Successes and orders
In 1934, Germaine Richier had her first solo exhibition at the Max Kaganovitch gallery in Paris. In 1936 she was awarded the Blumenthal Foundation Sculpture Prize in New York City for her sculpture Bust No. 2 . She was the first woman to receive this award. This made her one of the few women in art who succeeded as sculptors. In 1937, Richier took part in the World Exhibition in Paris. There she also received an award. The wife of the sculptor Peter Moillet , Maria Vanz, was her model.
In 1939, her work was shown in the French Pavilion of the World's Fair in New York along with the art of Pierre Bonnard , Georges Braque , Marc Chagall , Robert Delaunay , André Derain , Jacques Lipchitz and other artists. Germaine Richier spent the Second World War with her husband in Provence and temporarily in Switzerland . She exhibited at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur in 1942 and participated in a joint exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1943 with Fritz Wotruba and Marino Marini .
In 1946, Germaine Richier returned to Paris without her husband, from whom she finally separated in 1952. In 1949 she took on the task of contributing a work of art alongside Braque, Bonnard, Chagall, Lipchitz, Matisse , Rouault and other artists for furnishing the newly built church on the Plateau d'Assy near Passy in the Haute-Savoie department . She realized a crucifix . In 1948 she presented her sculpture L'Orage at the Venice Biennale , developed according to the body dimensions of Nardone, a former model by Rodin and now an old man.
International exhibition and retrospective
In 1954, Germaine Richier married the poet and art critic René de Solier . In the following years her works were shown worldwide: From 1955 to 1957 in an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam , in the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris and in New York City in the Martha Jackson Gallery . In 1958, Richier was represented again at the Venice Biennale. Germaine Richier died on July 31, 1959 in Montpellier at the age of 56 of complications from cancer while preparing for a large retrospective with 116 sculptures at Château Grimaldi in Antibes .
plant
Germaine Richier's early figurative sculpture was still shaped by the artistic influence of Émile-Antoine Bourdelle and Auguste Rodin, from which it gained increasingly independent, individual forms with which it became internationally known in the 1930s. From the mid-1940s onwards, Richier developed “hybrid beings”, “mutants of humans and animals, minerals and plants”, some of which were skeletal and appear emaciated and in a state of decay.
The Christ of Assy
Le Christ d'Assy |
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1949/50 |
bronze |
Église Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce; Plateau d'Assy , Passy (Haute-Savoie)
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The Christ on the cross is faceless, his hands and feet are missing. His body, like a root system, is reduced to a skeleton of arid, rod-like shapes, the surfaces of which appear rough and fissured. The work, designed for the newly built Church of Église Notre-Dame-de-Toute-Grâce near Passy, Haute-Savoie, was created in 1949/50 and was installed above the altar. Even before the inauguration on August 4, 1950, the work had been publicly criticized. As a result of an edict of the Vatican of July 10, 1950, Dell'Arte sacra deformatrice , which was translated into numerous national languages and distributed worldwide , according to which Richier's work was to be classified as a denigration of God, the crucifix was removed from its place. It was not until 1971, twenty years later, that it was put back on the high altar and classified as a historical monument.
Abstract hybrid creatures
Le Griffu (The Clawed Being) |
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1952 |
bronze |
Museum Ludwig ; Cologne
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Richier's abstract human, animal and mixed figures sometimes appear as if tied by wires or trapped in wire nets, but at the same time seem to actively pull on their tensions. Richier described her intention as follows: “I don't try to reproduce movement. My main intention is to make movement imaginable. My sculptures should give the impression of being immobile and wanting to move at the same time. ”The cracked surfaces and holes are ascribed to Rodin's bronze drawings with similar appearances; a "relationship" with the long, thin bronze figures of Alberto Giacometti , which he presented for the first time in Paris in 1951, is stated.
Richier, according to the art historian Karina Türr , translated the Gothicized models of her teacher Bourdelle differently than Giacometti. The skin of her Femme Sauterelle from 1946, for example, appears less structured and more injured. The still corporeal trunk ends in spider-like elongated limbs, which gives it its ghostly insect-like shape. The elongated figure should be understood neither as "with Bourdelle and Lehmbruck in the sense of spiritual expression, nor in correspondence with Giacometti as a sign of a figurative vision in space, but as a deformation and delimitation of the human image, as a tendency towards metamorphosis and frightening alienation - Richier is Laurens and Moore closer than Giacometti. "
meaning
Some of her works were presented at the documenta II in Kassel in the summer of 1959, the year Richier died, in the sculpture and graphics departments ; her work was posthumously represented at documenta III in 1964. After that, her work was forgotten for a long period of time. It was not until the 1990s that the artist was increasingly remembered as one of the most important French sculptors of modernism . In 1997 a large Germaine-Richier retrospective was held at the Berlin Academy of the Arts .
Exhibitions (selection)
Solo exhibitions
- 1934: Kaganovitch Gallery, Paris
- 1948: Galerie Maeght , Paris
- 1958: Walker Art Center , Minneapolis
- 1956: Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville des Paris
- 1963: Kunsthaus Zurich
- 1997: Academy of the Arts, Berlin
- 2013/2014: Retrospective, Kunstmuseum Bern
Group exhibitions
- 1948: XXIV Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, Biennale di Venezia , Venice
- 1951: 1st São Paulo Biennial , São Paulo , Brazil
- 1958: XXIX Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte, Biennale di Venezia, Venice
- 1959: documenta II , Kassel
- 1964: documenta III , Kassel
literature
- Corinne Linda Sotzek: Richier, Germaine. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- Valérie Da Costa: Germaine Richier. Un art entre deux mondes . Norma Éditions, Paris 2006 ( online, incomplete )
- Angela Lammert, Jörn Merkert (Eds.): Germaine Richier . Catalog of the exhibition at the Akademie der Künste (1997). Wienand, Berlin 1997
- André Pieyre de Mandiargues : Germaine Richier . Éditions Synthèses, Brussels 1959
- Raimer Stange: Germaine Richier. Movement at a standstill . In: Uta Grosenick (Ed.): Women Artists. Women artists in the 20th and 21st centuries . Cologne / London / Madrid / New York / Paris / Tokyo 2001, pp. 444–449
- Sarah Wilson: Germaine Richier. Disquieting matriarch . In: Sculpture Journal , Vol. 14/1. Liverpool 2005, pp. 51–70 ( PDF online )
Web links
- Literature by and about Germaine Richier in the catalog of the German National Library
- On the life and work of Germaine Richier
- Germaine Richier at the Tate Gallery, London (18 works)
- Germaine Richier: Praying Mantis , 1954 ( Memento from September 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- Materials by and about Germaine Richier in the documenta archive
- Sotzek Corinne: Richier, Germaine. In: Sikart
Individual evidence
- ↑ Corinne Sotzek: Germaine Richier . (Accessed March 26, 2010)
- ^ L'Orage ( Storm Man ) , Tate Gallery , London
- ↑ Sarah Wilson: Germaine Richier. Disquieting matriarch (2005), PDF p. 8 ( Memento from September 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ^ Raimer Stange: Germaine Richier. Movement at a standstill (2001), pp. 444, 449
- ↑ Valérie Da Costa: Germaine Richier. Un art entre deux mondes (2006), pp. 89-93
- ↑ Sarah Wilson: Germaine Richier. Disquieting matriarch (2005), PDF pp. 6–7 ( Memento from September 21, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Quoted from: Raimer Stange: Germaine Richier. Movement at a standstill (2001), p. 449
- ↑ Evelyn Weiss : Germaine Richier . In: Handbook Museum Ludwig . Cologne 19979, p. 668
- ↑ Lexikon der Kunst , Vol. IV. Seemann Leipzig 1968–1978; Reprint West Berlin 1981, p. 125
- ↑ Karina Türr: Tradition and Modernity in the Image of Man in the 20th Century . In: Theodora Vischer (cat.): Sculpture in the 20th century . Merian-Park Basel, June 3 to September 30, 1984, Basel 1984
- ↑ Karina Türr (1984), p. 26
Illustrations
personal data | |
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SURNAME | Richier, Germaine |
BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French sculptor and graphic artist |
DATE OF BIRTH | September 16, 1902 |
PLACE OF BIRTH | Grans near Arles, France |
DATE OF DEATH | July 31, 1959 |
Place of death | Montpellier , France |