Richier, Germaine

(1904-1959)

   sculptor

   Known for her expressionist sculptures based on animal life, Germaine Richier was born in Grans, Bouche-du-Rhône, and studied at the Beaux-Arts Academy in Montpellier. She trained with the sculptor antoine bourdelle and at first produced busts and standing figures. working in bronze beginning in 1944, she produced animals, including bats, crabs, insects, and spiders (La Mante religieuse, 1946; La Fourmi, 1953) and, abandoning traditional figurative convention, used her imagination also to create strange beings, either human, animal, vegetable, or mineral, that seemed to incarnate obscure and hostile forces. Richier's inspiration and imaginative repertoire reveal affinities with surrealism (Tauromachie, 1953; a series Hommes-Oiseaux, 1953; and La Montagne, 1956). Mixing inventive forms and elements having a ferocious realism, she submitted anatomies to strange metamorphoses (L'Aigle, 1948; La Feuille, 1948). Her works can evoke a world of anguish and aggression or grotesqueness and tragedy, often mixed together, showing a powerful expressionist temperament. Certain of Richier's other sculptures can be placed in an entirely different category, elegant and quiet, characterized by the combination of materials (lead, glass) and revealing a nonfigurative tendency (polychrome plaster, 1957-58).