Germaine Richier (1902-1959) was the first woman to be exhibited during her lifetime at the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In this year 1956, his sculptures then succeed in the rooms to the retrospective Matisse: it is the national consecration.
Three years later, when she died during the summer, her bronzes are confronted with those of Giacometti and paintings by Bacon, Dubuffet, Pollock or De Kooning in the exhibition “New Images of Man” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) of New York: the international consecration came, prepared by exhibitions in New York, London or Bern and by its participation in the Biennale of Sao Paulo, from its first edition in 1951, and, several times also, in that of Venice. Picasso, Ernst, Miro and many others expressed their admiration for him. Jean Paulhan, Georges Limbour, Francis Ponge… There are also many authors who write about him.
It prevents. Between the 1956 exhibition and the one held in Beaubourg until June 12 – and will go, from July 12 to November 5, to the Fabre Museum, in Montpellier –, there has not been a single major retrospective. in a Parisian museum; that of the Maeght Foundation, in 1996, remained without follow-up for a quarter of a century.
Why this eclipse, so long that its name was more familiar only to lovers of modern sculpture, when Richier’s recognition had been strong in the 1950s? Or, to put it another way, what convinced his contemporaries and kept later generations at a distance?
If she had not had such success during her lifetime, we would accuse the machismo of an artistic milieu, that of sculpture, then almost exclusively male and where the role assigned to women was to undress and pose. But it does not seem that she was a victim of it: she thus affirmed, in 1956, that she had never met “no difficulty” because woman. “The current era opens all doors as much to men as to women or to women as to men”, she assures. This generality is skeptical, but it is true that his career, far from being delayed, was favored by his peers, including Bourdelle, who welcomed the young woman from Montpellier into his studio in 1926.
The artist exhibited in Parisian salons every year from 1928, obtained commissions, had his own studio and, soon, students. In 1939, the Director General of Fine Arts asked her for a large sculpture, a project erased by the war. She spent this time in Zurich, where her first husband, a sculptor himself, Otto Bänninger, came from and, during these Swiss years, worked and exhibited as much as in France previously. She meets Jean Arp, the Giacometti brothers, Marino Marini and, already, writers who support her, including Charles-Albert Cingria. When she moved back to Paris after the war, she was no stranger.
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