Bibliography

• 3 Parisskulptörer, Stockholm, Färg och form, 24 avril - 22 mai 1970, repr.
• Patrice Dubois, René Babin, exposition de sculptures, Paris, Axa Assurances, avenue Matignon, octobre - novembre 2001, repr.
• Babin completed The Star in a few sessions with a former trapeze artist as his model.

His sculpture doesn’t show useless details, following the example of Rodin. His model allows one to see the work from the sculptor’s hand, evoking the waxes of the Dancers of Degas.

The Star distinguishes itself from the other sculptures of Babin. Its bold composition relies on the opening of strong axes in space, unlike those of The Pomegranate or The Sweet Song, in which the block form is always present. Also, his feminine example, muscular and energetic, is nothing like the roundness of the immobile women that are usually present in his work.

“It is this aptitude for expressing life in its very impulse that we find in The Star, created in the atelier of the sculptor Gudmar Olovson (1969), at the same time as the creation of this version that he, under the name of Concorde, gave it. The figure is balanced on one leg, in a movement that is full of force, modeled inch by inch, in the very texture of the clay. Here, the model, in the extension of her lines, is completely reinvented, and owes the essential part of her strength to the feeling of the artist; it is he who breathes life into her, and gives her grace. The modeling, both nervous and tight, with very tactile effects, reveals the emotion of René Babin, and betrays, if this can be said, his temperament. In this work completed in a few sessions, the spirit of decision of the sculptor manifests itself in a dramatic way, able to make conclusive choices at any moment and to decide in the virtualities of the living”[1].