Seated Woman (Richier, 1944)

Germaine Richier

Seated Woman 1944

Plaster
H. 52, W. 23.5, D. 28 cm

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Provenance

  • Switzerland, private collection

Bibliographie

  • 1946 ARTICLE : Manuel Gasser, « Germaine Richier », Werk Kunst Architektur Künstlerisches Gewerbe, 33rd y., n°3, mars 1946, ill. (un plâtre dans l’atelier de l’artiste)
  • 1947 EXPOSITION : Germaine Richier, Genève, galerie Georges Moos, 23 mars – 11 avril 1947, p.66
  • 1947 EXPOSITION : Sculptures of Germaine Richier; engravings studio of Roger Lacourière, Londres, Anglo French Art Centre, 8 septembre – 30 septembre 1947, n°9, non repr. (plâtre)
  • 1948 EXPOSITION : « Germaine Richier », Derrière le Miroir, n°15, Paris, éd. Galerie Maeght, 1948, non repr. n°3. (vue d’atelier, modèle en plâtre)
  • 1963 EXPOSITION : Germaine Richier, Zürich, Kunsthaus, 12 juin-21 juillet 1963, n°7 (plâtre original, héritiers de Germaine Richier)
  • 1996 EXPOSITION : Germaine Richier, rétrospective, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, 5 avril - 25 juin 1996, n°12, p.43 (épreuve en bronze)
  • 1997 EXPOSITION : Germaine Richier, textes de Lammert, A., Lichtenstern, C., Merkert, J., Berlin, Akademie der Künste, 1997, n°18 (épreuve en bronze)
  • 2007 EXPOSITION Barbero, Luca Massimo, Germaine Richier, Venise, Peggy Guggenheim collection, 28 octobre - 5 février 2007, p.66 ((plâtre original, héritiers de Germaine Richier)
  • 2001 GROSENICK : Grosenick, Uta, Women Artists. Femmes artistes du XXe et du XXIe siècle, Taschen, Köln, 2001, p. 446, repr. (plâtre identique au nôtre).
  • EXPOSITION, Germaine Richier, la magicienne, musée Picasso, Antibes 6 octobre 2019 – 26 janvier 2020 et Germaine Richier, Mensbeeld – .Mensbeest, musée Beelden aan Zee, La Haye, 14 mars – 7 juin 2020 (vue atelier de Zurich p.124-125)
  • 2023 EXPOSITION : Coulondre, Ariane, sous la direction de, Germaine Richier, Paris, Centre Pompidou, 1er mars – 12 juin 2023 ; Montpellier, musée Fabre, 12 juillet – 5 novembre 2023, repr., p. 101 (plâtre original, collection particulière)
  • 2023 DURIEU : Durieu, Laurence, Germaine Richier, L’Ouragane, Lyon, Fage Editions, 2023. P.150-151, repr. (un plâtre et un bronze).
“I need models. I have to have nature in front of me as I work. I invent more easily when looking at it. The presence of nature makes me independent.”[1]
 
Seated Woman was created during the war while Germaine Richier was living in Zurich, Switzerland, with her husband Otto Bänninger. It was during this productive period that she found her personal language, in which human representations took on strange hybrid forms. This sculpture is one of a series of seated figures that she worked on between 1937 and 1953. The series ended with Water (a copy is held by the MNAM, inv. AM1022Bis), which presents a radical vision of a goddess in the form of an amphora, headless, and following the same composition as Seated Woman.
 
Immediately before Seated Woman, the theme of the seated nude was addressed by Nude VII and Cornélia, figures that are relatively faithful to their models. But with this work, the language shifts and becomes radicalized: the stem is left visible, serving as the figure’s sole support and making it seem to float in space. The extremities—feet and hands—are incomplete, suggesting stumps, and the face is roughly treated, even disfigured, with asymmetrical eyes, one convex, the other concave—characteristics that would be repeated in Richier’s art and would come to define her personal language.
 
This body, with its wide hips and voluptuous flesh, is that of a model known as “Bouboule.” In 1945, the artist created a standing nude version that she titled Pomona, a mythological theme that had also been treated by her master, Bourdelle, as well as by Maillol and her friend Marino Marini. The theme of Pomona rests on the idea of the Metamorphosis, an inexhaustible source of inspiration for Germaine Richier.
 
Shown for the first time at the Moos Gallery in Geneva in 1947, the plaster Seated Woman was on the cover of the catalogue.
 
The original plaster, which was on show in the large retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 2023, is held in a private collection. Another plaster model is known: similar to ours, it is owned by the city of Biel in Switzerland. There is also a bronze edition of the model[2] and an “English cement” edition produced by ARTA around 1953-1954. The latter edition is justified on 30 copies, one of which is kept at the Kunstmuseum Basel (Inv G 1978.120).
[1] Germaine Richier to Alain Jouffroy in. « Portrait d’un artiste », Arts, August, 8th 1956.
[2] Like our proof, the one from the city of Biel has no inscription or stamp. It was bequeathed to the city by Franz Josef Kopp in 2006.