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Description: Germaine Richier (1904-1959)
Le coureur (grand)
incised 'G. Richier HC1' (on the base); stamped 'Susse Fondeur Paris' (on the back of the base)
bronze with black patina
80¾in. (205cm.) high
Conceived in 1954 and cast at a later date, this work is hors de commerce one from an edition of six

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Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by the father of the present owner, and thence by descent.

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Published: Akademie der Künst (ed.), Germaine Richier, Berlin 1997, no. 80, p. 193.

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Notes: VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
Le Coureur is a thin and elongated portrait of a long distance runner and is one of Germaine Richier's very few public commissions, originally for the Jean Bouin stadium in Paris.

Germaine Richier's decision to use Lyrot, the same lean model used for her sculpture Le Griffu in 1952, exaggerates and emphasises, through its slenderness, the impression of the solitude of the athlete who is lost in his own space and thoughts. Instead of glorifying the heroic sporting figure, Richier through her choice of the long distance runner, employs the figure as a metaphor for the loneliness of man's existence and the survival of the human body.

The scarring and pitting to the surface of the sculpture and its decomposition suggest the vulnerability of the human being. The substance of the work and its skin express a dramatic tension, giving the figure a tormented appearance recalling the general atmosphere of anxiety in a Post-War era in the 1950s. Like many of Germaine Richier's sculptures from that time, the fractured appearance of her works is the key to their meaning.

The expressive emphasis on the physical gesture and on the material substance of the work asserts a powerful reflection of the day's concerns which so often questioned the meaning of existence. As Germaine Richier stated on the occasion of New Images of Man exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art of New York in 1959: "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" (Richier, quoted in Frances Morris, Paris Post War Art and Existentialism 1945-55, London 1993, p. 162).