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Lot Essay
"My nature does not allow me calmness: one is as one is, and age does not make me milder or more serene, not that I am fighting, but it is in me, with me. More and more I am certain that only humanness matters." (Germain Richier in Fragments de Lettres au Sculpteur Banninger 1950-56 in Galerie Creuzevault (ed.) Germane Richier Paris. 1966.)
On the outbreak of the Second World War, Richier and her first husband Otto Banninger had been holidaying in Switzerland and had decided to stay for the duration of the war. In Switzerland Richier came into contact with a new group of artists among them Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini whose influence along with the impact of the war profoundly altered the direction of her work. Returning to Paris in 1946, Richier began work on a new series of standing figure sculptures whose startling originality marked her maturation as a sculptor and established her work as amongst the most powerfully expressive art being created in Europe. La Vierge folle (The Crazy Virgin) was the first work of this new series and, like the others that followed, is distinguished by its seemingly scorched material surface and its expressive obliteration of certain key human features.
Seeming to reflect the psychological impact of the war on the human figure as if it were a physical reality, Richier's work conveys a persuasive sense of the existential torment suffered by many Europeans during the previous six years of conflict. The semi-obliterated face of La Vierge folle in particular calls to mind Jean Fautrier's powerful Otage paintings of anonymous hostages executed by the Germans as well as his 1942 sculpture Grand Tête tragique in which similarly, the innate humanity of the figure seems to have been grossly assaulted.
Despite the ravages of circumstance however, Richier's upright figures maintain a sense of human dignity or even nobility. Survivors of a holocaust, Richier attempts to express the innate humanness underlying her tormented figures. Despite her naked and impoverished condition, in La Vierge folle this seemingly pregnant, but perhaps malnourished virgin, is depicted protecting and covering herself in an act of modesty.