“Maine was a marvellous friend and a very great artist. She succeeded in perfectly integrating the most unpredictable and dramatic elements of nature into an aesthetic pattern. Her sculptures have a life of their own, as present and powerful as the life of plants and stones, water and dumb animals. […] I feel the force of her work as only a sculptor can feel iti.”
This is how Robert Couturier (1905-2008) paid tribute to his friend Germaine Richier (1902-1959) who passed away in the summer of 1959. Being of the same generation, they met during the 1930s, a period when their work was taking shape, and participated in the exhibition “Contemporary Sculpture in France” at the Georges Petit gallery in Paris in 1934. During the same years, they also received the Blumenthal Prize, in 1930 for Robert Couturier and in 1936 for Germaine Richier. The post-war years marked the beginning of the recognition of their work.
They were both present in major collective exhibitions, notably in 1948 at the exhibitions “Contemporary Sculptors of the School of Paris” (Kunsthalle, Bern) and “Thirteen Sculptors of the School of Paris” (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam), as well as at the Venice Biennales, in 1950 for Robert Couturier and in 1952 for Germaine Richier. They also participated in the first São Paulo Biennale in 1951, where each of them had one of their sculptures acquired (Richier’s “La Forêt” from 1946 joined the collection of the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art, and Couturier’s “La Jeune fille lamelliforme” from 1950 joined the collection of the Rio de Janeiro Museum of Modern Art).
Driven by a shared reflection on the representation of the human figure, which they notably shared with Alberto Giacometti, they sought to renew and deeply rethink the figurative language of sculpture. They created works where the bodies were highly constructed and elongated, with voids integrated into the form and irregular and heightened materials.
While Germaine Richier created a fantastic atmosphere inhabited by hybrid beings, Robert Couturier imagined a more mental expression marked by a certain Apollonian atmosphere.
This exhibition brings together these two sculptural personalities of the 1950s, highlighting the formal and aesthetic connections that bound these two artist-friends in the context of the post-war and 1950s years.
Valérie Da Costa
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Exhibition Curator:
Valérie Da Costa is an art historian, art critic, and exhibition curator. Her work focuses notably on modern and contemporary sculpture and Italian art of the second half of the 20th century, on which she has published numerous texts and books in France and abroad. She recently curated the exhibitions “Germaine Richier, la magicienne” (Picasso Museum, Antibes, 2019), “Piero Gilardi, dalla natura all’arte” (Galerie Michel Rein, Paris, 2020), “Maillol, la forme libre” (Galerie Dina Vierny, 2021), “Turi Simeti: l’aventure monochrome(s)” (Galerie Almine Rech, 2022), and “Vita Nuova. Nouveaux enjeux de l’art en Italie 1960-1975” (MAMAC, Nice, 2022).