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拍品专文
A haunting apparition in scarred and textured bronze, The Pentacle (1954) is a powerful example of Germaine Richier’s sculptural practice. One of the most important sculptors in postwar France, Richier’s works reflected the existential angst of her era: the present figure, with his broken, cyclopean head, spindly arms and scored skin, appears as a wrecked being walking into an uncertain future. The concentric lines that inscribe his abdomen and back invoke the protective talismanic symbol of the work’s title. His upright pose strikes a poignant, gently humorous note of defiance. Unlike her contemporaries Alberto Giacometti and Jean Fautrier—or, indeed, the British ‘Geometry of Fear’ sculptors such as Reg Butler and Lynn Chadwick, upon whom she had a great influence—Richier consistently observed her figures from life. The model for the present work was Libero Nardone, who was also the subject of Richier’s masterpiece L’Orage (Storm Man) (1947-1948, Tate), and as a much younger man had modelled for Auguste Rodin. The Pentacle is an icon of Richier’s oeuvre, and has been prominently exhibited at major international retrospectives across Europe and the United States over the past half-century.
By working with Nardone, the model who had posed for such iconic works as Rodin’s The Kiss and Monument to Balzac some five decades earlier, Richier consciously placed her work in dialogue with the modern master of monumental sculpture. The link was more than incidental: after studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Montepellier, Richier had spent a formative three years working with the influential sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, who himself had been taught by Rodin. She remained in Bourdelle’s Paris studio until his death in 1929, encountering other students of his including Giacometti and Henri Matisse. Richier spent the war years in Provence and Switzerland; it was upon her return to Paris in the postwar years that she arrived at her signature style.
While The Pentacle invokes her antecedents, Richier’s radical treatment of the figure also makes a stylistic break with the past. Her model himself is ravaged by time—a man now in his eighties, paunchy and frail compared to the muscular young body Rodin had observed—and the sculpture’s rough, pitted and incised surface posits a state of degradation, picturing the philosophical malaise that hung over Paris after the Second World War. In her earlier responses to the conflict, Richier had created human-animal hybrids in works such as La Mante (The Praying Mantis) (1947), a frightening creature that embodies the aggression and inhumanity the world had witnessed. Over the ensuing years, however, she shifted her focus to entirely human figures, reaffirming her commitment to working from nature. For all his precarity, The Pentacle’s figure holds himself with a touching dignity, and his scarified physique is charged with a compressed sense of energy. It is an image of violence, but also of fortitude and survival. ‘The further I go,’ Richier wrote to her husband Otto Charles Bänninger in 1956, ‘the more certain I am that only the human counts’ (G. Richier, quoted in V. da Costa, Germaine Richier: Un art entre deux mondes, Paris 2006, p. 14).
By working with Nardone, the model who had posed for such iconic works as Rodin’s The Kiss and Monument to Balzac some five decades earlier, Richier consciously placed her work in dialogue with the modern master of monumental sculpture. The link was more than incidental: after studying at the École des Beaux Arts in Montepellier, Richier had spent a formative three years working with the influential sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, who himself had been taught by Rodin. She remained in Bourdelle’s Paris studio until his death in 1929, encountering other students of his including Giacometti and Henri Matisse. Richier spent the war years in Provence and Switzerland; it was upon her return to Paris in the postwar years that she arrived at her signature style.
While The Pentacle invokes her antecedents, Richier’s radical treatment of the figure also makes a stylistic break with the past. Her model himself is ravaged by time—a man now in his eighties, paunchy and frail compared to the muscular young body Rodin had observed—and the sculpture’s rough, pitted and incised surface posits a state of degradation, picturing the philosophical malaise that hung over Paris after the Second World War. In her earlier responses to the conflict, Richier had created human-animal hybrids in works such as La Mante (The Praying Mantis) (1947), a frightening creature that embodies the aggression and inhumanity the world had witnessed. Over the ensuing years, however, she shifted her focus to entirely human figures, reaffirming her commitment to working from nature. For all his precarity, The Pentacle’s figure holds himself with a touching dignity, and his scarified physique is charged with a compressed sense of energy. It is an image of violence, but also of fortitude and survival. ‘The further I go,’ Richier wrote to her husband Otto Charles Bänninger in 1956, ‘the more certain I am that only the human counts’ (G. Richier, quoted in V. da Costa, Germaine Richier: Un art entre deux mondes, Paris 2006, p. 14).