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Artist or Maker: Germaine Richier (1902-1959)
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Provenance: Acquired from the artist's estate by the present owner in 1989.
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Literature: W. George, 'Germaine Richier', in Prisme des arts, Paris, April 1956, no. 2.
Exh. cat., Germaine Richier, Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris, 1956 (another cast illustrated).
D. Chevalier, 'Un grand sculpteur: Germaine Richier', in Prestige français et Mondanités, Paris, September 1956, no. 19, pp. 60-65.
A. Chastel, 'Germaine Richier: la puissance et le malaise', in Le Monde, Paris, 13 October 1956.
C. Roger-Marx, 'Cette héritière inspirée des grands maîtres: Germaine Richier', in Le Figaro littéraire, Paris, 8 August 1959.
R. Dor de la Souchère (intro.), in H. Creuzevault, Germaine Richier (1904-1959), Paris, July 1966.
R. Penrose, Scrapbook 1900-1981, London, 1981, p. 184 (another cast illustrated pl. 459).
I. Jianou, G. Xurigura & A. Lardera, 'Richier Germaine', in La Sculpture moderne, Paris, 1982, p. 178.
Exh. cat., In the Mind's Eye: Dada and Surrealism, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 1984-1985, p. 205.
E. Lebovici, 'L'atelier de Germaine Richier vu par Pierre-Olivier Deschamps', in Beaux-Arts Magazine, Paris, November 1989, no. 73, pp. 94-99.
I. Goldberg, 'Les bêtes humaines de Germaine Richier', in Beaux-Arts Magazine, Paris, May 1996 (another cast illustrated pp. 64-68).
A. Dreyfus, 'Germaine Richier, des spectres familiers', in Libération, Paris, 18 June 1996 (another cast illustrated p. 37).
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Notes: THE PROPERTY OF A GENTLEMAN
Françoise Guiter will include this work in her forthcoming Richier catalogue raisonné.
'My work is fundamentally Surrealist' (Germaine Richier)
In the aftermath of the Second World War Germaine Richier set to work in a burst of extraordinary creativity that produced a magical array of hauntingly powerful and mysterious hybrid creatures who seemed to articulate the nightmares of the age. Seeming to rise phoenix-like out of the ashes of what was left of European civilization after five years of war, Richier's strange mutant figures appeared on the cultural landscape like long-forgotten archetypes. Personifications and dream-figures of Europe's dark and troubled unconscious, the apparitions that Richier seemed to be resurrecting rather than giving birth to were like spectres and demons from the time of the middle-ages.
L'Homme de la nuit, grand is the large version of a peculiar hybrid figure seemingly part man, part bat that is in turns both comic and macabre. A creature of the night, as its title suggests, it seems to have flown straight out of some mediaeval nightmare or Goya's famous El Sueño de la razón produce monstruos. For Richier the hybrid was a convenient vehicle of expressing the monstrous and mutated nature of mankind in the aftermath of the war. The devastation, both psychological and physical that had been wrought by the war and the dawning of a new terrifying age of Cold War ambiguities and of the atomic dismantling of matter led to many European artists investigating the fundaments of material. In her chthonic sculptures conjuring the gods of an earlier time, Richier combined this very tactile and human preoccupation with matter with an equivalent and penetrating psychology. In this respect, as she often pointed out, her aesthetic was one that was 'fundamentally Surrealist'.
As Romuald Dor de la Souchère (Director of the Picasso Museum in Antibes) wrote for the 1959 retrospective exhibition of Richier: 'Si le Surréalisme est une prise de possession de l'imaginaire, s'il est la recherche de certaines formes d'associations jusqu'alors inconnues ou négligées, dans la mesure où son oeuvre décide de la licence de nouveaux êtres concus par des moyens illégaux, et bien entendu à la condition de conférer aux mots une importance imprévue, alors nous pouvons répéter avec elle: "Mon oeuvre est fondamentalement surréaliste."'
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