Raymond Martin (1910-1992)
Raymond Martin was born in Paris on the twenty-fourth of April 1910. In 1925, he entered the Ecole des Arts Appliqués where Robert Wlérick and Jules Jouan (a former student of Dalou and Rodin) were his teachers. He then became a student at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Jules Coutan’s studio. From 1927, he was a regular participant in the Tuileries Salon. In 1932, the Paquereau Gallery displayed his work and he was granted the Blumenthal Prize.
At the Fall Salon, he presented his Head of Eve (acquired by the State) in 1933, and in 1937 The Sleeper (acquired by the Paris Museum of Modern Art). Robert Wlérick chose him to work with on the equestrian statue of Marshal Foch (1936-1951), set in the middle of the Trocadéro. Martin then made the monument of General Mangin (1950-1954), which was erected next to the Saint-François Xavier Church, and General Leclerc’s monument (1965-1969) in Paris. In 1973, the State of Tunisia commissioned him an equestrian statue of President Habib Bourguiba.
However, Martin also achieved more intimate works, in which drawing, and the work with the model prevailed. His major works are: Eve, Christiane, The Defeated, his father’s bust, Christ, and at the end of the Forties, the illustration of Maurice de Guérin’s “prose poetry” and The Centaur and The Bacchant, which are lithographies. In 1944, he took over Robert Wlérick’s teaching post at la Grande Chaumière and stayed there until 1951. In 1949, he succeeded to Marcel Gimond as a teacher at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs.
In 1963, he was a founding member of the Groupe des Neuf and participated in the group’s events, including the First festival of Contemporary Sculpture in 1967. Individual exhibitions dedicated to his work took place at the “New Impulse” Gallery (in 1945, 1947, 1950) and at the Pacitti Gallery in 1969. He was elected at the Fine Arts Academy in 1962. The Galliera Museum and the Paris Money both held major retrospectives of his work: the former in 1960, the latter in 1985.
