Lot 4: Germaine Richier (1902-1959)

La Tauromachie inscribed with the signature 'G. Richier' (on the base); stamped with the foundry mark 'Susse fondeur Paris' (on the side of the base) bronze 45 5/8in. (116cm.) high Conceived in 1953 this work is from an edition of eleven PROVENANCE The Hanover Gallery, London (1961). Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner in September 1961. LITERATURE J. Cassou, Sculpteurs modernes: Germaine Richier, Amsterdam 1961, pl. 27 (illustrated). Exh. cat., Works from the Peggy Guggenheim Foundation, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 1969 (illustrated, p. 136). J. Tello, La Escultura en Venezuela, Caracas 1971. EXHIBITION Paris, Mus‚e national d'art moderne, Germaine Richier, October-December 1956, no. 40. New York, Martha Jackson Gallery, The Sculpture of Germaine Richier, November-December 1957, no. 10 (another cast illustrated). London, The Hanover Gallery, Sculpture and Drawings, June-September 1961 (illustrated). London, The Hanover Gallery, Contrasts, July-August 1967, pl. 56 (another cast illustrated). Zurich, Gimpel & Hanover Galerie, Germaine Richier, C‚sar, Louis Lutz skulpturen, February-April 1970 (another cast illustrated). London, Gimpel Fils, Germaine Richier, June-August 1973, no. 12 (another cast illustrated). Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Fondation Maeght, Germaine Richier R‚trospective, April-September 1996 (another cast illustrated). NOTES To be included in the forthcoming Germaine Richier catalogue raisonn‚ being prepared by Mme Fran‡oise Guiter, Paris. A potent invocation of defeat and decay, La Tauromachie is a striking image not only of Germaine Richier's art, but also of the post-war period of angst and existentialism. During the mid-1940s, Richier's art had taken on a strange air, with hybrid, anthropomorphic creatures, the modern incarnations of Hieronymous Bosch's art, in positions of tension, each one seemingly a harbinger of death. Predators and predatory positions played a special role in her art at the time, represented in La Tauromachie by the striding figure, who appears to be a banderillero with his two weapons held triumphantly in his hands while passing the skull, which would seem to be that of his victim. However, there is a distinction in this scene between domination and victory - there is no sense of the artist's admiration for the killer. Instead, the skull is given more of a sense of stability and solidity than the striding figure, who appears to be rotting and decomposing. This putrefactive process features often in Richier's art: "What characterises sculpture, in my opinion, is the way in which it renounces the full, solid form. Holes and perforations conduct like flashes of lightning into the material which becomes organic and open, encircled from all sides, lit up in and through the hollows. A form lives to the extent to which it does not withdraw from expression. And we decidedly cannot conceal human expression in the drama of our time." (G. Richier, in: F. Morris, Paris Post War: Art and Existentialism 1945-55, exh. cat., London 1993, p. 162.) The putrefaction is in part the embodiment of the tensions and doubts of a world still so visibly scarred by the war that had raged through it. It also has a formal purpose, allowing textural plays of light and darkness, presenting a variegated and organic feel to the work. While bullfighting played a great part in Picasso's art during this period, the influence of Giacometti, with whom Richier shared her wartime exile in Switzerland, is more evident. Not only do the feet and legs of the striding figure recall his work, but the organic build-up of the body is almost an inverted reflection of his work. Likewise, there is a sense of the consituent parts in Richier's work. La Tauromachie appears in part to be the result of the assemblage of found objects, making the scene a product of the real world. Despite this, where Giacometti's forms appear to have been built up, hewn from the clay of life itself, Richier, even in her use of objects from the world of the viewer, explores the opposite process, the decomposition of the figure. Richier implies that, despite his seemingly victorious killing of the bull, the figure is inexorably striding towards his own end. The trident shape of the stylised head, with its diminutive horns, perhaps hints at some closer affinity between the bull and his killer, as though they were two sides of the same coin, related in some way. This also lends his actual form a sense of violence, as though he were some weapon in his own right. While Richier has ensured that nature and natural forms are invoked in this work, she leaves the viewer in little doubt that nature itself can be both wondrous and terrifying. While the figure implies human destruction, this pronged head seems to imply that violence is present as much in nature as in mankind. Indeed, despite the use of tools, a seemingly advanced trait in the human species, Richier has managed to capture a distinctly sinister and animal air in the strange figure.