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Lot Essay
Germaine Richier’s L’Orage (Storm Man) and L’Ouragane (Hurricane Woman) are among the most iconic sculptures to emerge from the creative ferment of post-war Paris. Conceived as companions between 1947 and 1949, the life-sized bronze figures bear weathered, wounded surfaces that picture the shellshocked state of mankind. In tune with their titles, they can also be seen as embodiments of elemental force, charged with a tempestuous energy that suggests the human spirit’s strength and survival. Powerful and imposing, they are poised as if to step forward into a new era. Versions of L’Orage and L’Ouragane are in the collections of museums including Tate, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
Richier was born in 1904 and grew up in Montpellier. She studied there in the studio of Louis-Jacques Guigues before moving to Paris, where she trained under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle from 1926 until 1929. Both men had worked with the founding father of modern sculpture, Auguste Rodin—Guigues as his assistant, Bourdelle as a student—and Richier herself would go on to extend Rodin’s legacy of expressive, turbulent and complex modelling in clay. To create L’Orage, she worked from the eighty-year-old life model Antonio Nardone, who had posed for Rodin some five decades earlier. This was at once an act of homage and a signal of a historical break. No longer the young man Rodin had captured in The Kiss (1882) and Monument to Balzac (1892-1897), Nardone’s aged physique was heavy with the ravages of time. Richier gouged and eroded the clay as she worked, creating an image of entropy and endurance.
The Second World War was a turning point in Richier’s work. After spending the years of the conflict in Provence and Switzerland she returned to Paris in 1946. She began to create hybrid figures such as La Mante (The Praying Mantis) (1947), incarnations of atrocity in frightening, semi-human form. They chimed with the works of Alberto Giacometti—another student of Bourdelle’s—whose own attenuated figures would become emblematic of the era’s philosophical malaise. Like Giacometti, Richier built her works in clay over wire armatures before casting them in bronze. She drew upon memories of a visceral encounter with the plaster-cast bodies in the ruins of Pompeii, which she had visited in 1935. L’Orage and L’Ouragane marked Richier’s return to working from life, and her arrival at the existential zeitgeist. They stand together like the Adam and Eve of a fallen world.
Richier reached a level of recognition rare for a woman artist at the time. She was championed by Giacometti and Jean Arp, and by poets including Francis Ponge, who wrote texts to accompany her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in 1948. She took part in that year’s Venice Biennale, returning in 1952 to show L’Orage and L’Ouragane. In England she inspired a new school of sculptors including Reg Butler and Lynn Chadwick, whose style came to be known as ‘the geometry of fear’: in 1955, the British critic David Sylvester wrote that ‘Nobody, perhaps, occupies so central, so crucial, a position in contemporary sculpture as Germaine Richier’ (D. Sylvester, ‘On Germaine Richier’, in Germaine Richier, exh. cat. Hanover Gallery, London 1955, n.p.). The following year, Richier became the first living woman to be given a retrospective at the Musée national d’Art Moderne in Paris. The museum’s director Jean Cassou called her ‘the most complete artist there is, both a master of her technique and gifted with a breathtaking, utterly convincing poetic imagination’ (J. Cassou, ‘Germaine Richier’, in Germaine Richier, exh. cat. Musée national d’Art Moderne, Paris 1956, p. 6).
Richier endowed L’Orage and L’Ouragane with a palpable humanity. She enjoyed posing for photographs with them in her studio—creating stage-like scenes among mirrors and figures of different sizes—and installed a cast of L’Ouragane in her garden, tangled in foliage, where she confronted visitors who walked down the path. ‘I had the impression of entering this strange world, after the ravages of the atomic deluge’, wrote the great photographer Brassaï of his visit to the studio. ‘... Two monumental, gaunt figures, with wild eyes and limp arms, still trembling with terror, two raw, flayed souls, miraculously escaped from some unknown catastrophe’ (Brassaï, Les artistes de ma vie, Paris 1982, p. 194). In 1956, just three years before her own death, Richier created a pair of abstract, geometric tombstones for L’Orage and L’Ouragane which are housed in the Musée Picasso, Antibes. She seems to have regarded the sculptures as living beings, as mortal as they were full of vitality.
Richier was born in 1904 and grew up in Montpellier. She studied there in the studio of Louis-Jacques Guigues before moving to Paris, where she trained under the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle from 1926 until 1929. Both men had worked with the founding father of modern sculpture, Auguste Rodin—Guigues as his assistant, Bourdelle as a student—and Richier herself would go on to extend Rodin’s legacy of expressive, turbulent and complex modelling in clay. To create L’Orage, she worked from the eighty-year-old life model Antonio Nardone, who had posed for Rodin some five decades earlier. This was at once an act of homage and a signal of a historical break. No longer the young man Rodin had captured in The Kiss (1882) and Monument to Balzac (1892-1897), Nardone’s aged physique was heavy with the ravages of time. Richier gouged and eroded the clay as she worked, creating an image of entropy and endurance.
The Second World War was a turning point in Richier’s work. After spending the years of the conflict in Provence and Switzerland she returned to Paris in 1946. She began to create hybrid figures such as La Mante (The Praying Mantis) (1947), incarnations of atrocity in frightening, semi-human form. They chimed with the works of Alberto Giacometti—another student of Bourdelle’s—whose own attenuated figures would become emblematic of the era’s philosophical malaise. Like Giacometti, Richier built her works in clay over wire armatures before casting them in bronze. She drew upon memories of a visceral encounter with the plaster-cast bodies in the ruins of Pompeii, which she had visited in 1935. L’Orage and L’Ouragane marked Richier’s return to working from life, and her arrival at the existential zeitgeist. They stand together like the Adam and Eve of a fallen world.
Richier reached a level of recognition rare for a woman artist at the time. She was championed by Giacometti and Jean Arp, and by poets including Francis Ponge, who wrote texts to accompany her first solo exhibition at the Galerie Maeght in 1948. She took part in that year’s Venice Biennale, returning in 1952 to show L’Orage and L’Ouragane. In England she inspired a new school of sculptors including Reg Butler and Lynn Chadwick, whose style came to be known as ‘the geometry of fear’: in 1955, the British critic David Sylvester wrote that ‘Nobody, perhaps, occupies so central, so crucial, a position in contemporary sculpture as Germaine Richier’ (D. Sylvester, ‘On Germaine Richier’, in Germaine Richier, exh. cat. Hanover Gallery, London 1955, n.p.). The following year, Richier became the first living woman to be given a retrospective at the Musée national d’Art Moderne in Paris. The museum’s director Jean Cassou called her ‘the most complete artist there is, both a master of her technique and gifted with a breathtaking, utterly convincing poetic imagination’ (J. Cassou, ‘Germaine Richier’, in Germaine Richier, exh. cat. Musée national d’Art Moderne, Paris 1956, p. 6).
Richier endowed L’Orage and L’Ouragane with a palpable humanity. She enjoyed posing for photographs with them in her studio—creating stage-like scenes among mirrors and figures of different sizes—and installed a cast of L’Ouragane in her garden, tangled in foliage, where she confronted visitors who walked down the path. ‘I had the impression of entering this strange world, after the ravages of the atomic deluge’, wrote the great photographer Brassaï of his visit to the studio. ‘... Two monumental, gaunt figures, with wild eyes and limp arms, still trembling with terror, two raw, flayed souls, miraculously escaped from some unknown catastrophe’ (Brassaï, Les artistes de ma vie, Paris 1982, p. 194). In 1956, just three years before her own death, Richier created a pair of abstract, geometric tombstones for L’Orage and L’Ouragane which are housed in the Musée Picasso, Antibes. She seems to have regarded the sculptures as living beings, as mortal as they were full of vitality.