2. Artists & stock
3. Germaine Richier
4. Biography

Notes of biography

Germaine Richier was born in Grans (Bouches-du-Rhone, France) in 1904, where she spent her childhood. From 1922-1925, she studied at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Montpellier in the studio of Guigues, the former assistant of Rodin. Germaine Richier went to Paris in 1925, studying with Antoine Bourdelle until 1929, the year she married the sculptor Otto Banninger. She worked completely independently in her own studio, starting out on “the total conquest of her metier”, and already understanding the conviction formulated by Rodin and Bourdelle that “Sculpture is the art of the interior.”
Her first solo exhibition was organised in 1934 at the Galerie Max Kaganovitch in Paris. The early works of Germaine Richier obeyed the rules of classical, realist sculpture. During the war, she lived in Switzerland, then in Provence. From 1940, the artist used her work to convey her feelings of disquiet about the war, and her tragic vision of a society in decay. Germaine Richier then creates figures of men and animals that are frightening, petrified, fantastic biomorphic creatures from an era that cannot be determined, but that is, in fact, none other than the artist’s own modern era.
Immediately after the war, Germaine Richier exhibited her work in galleries, biennales and salons, and group and solo exhibitions both in France and abroad (Switzerland, England, The Netherlands, Italy, Chile, etc.). In 1950, she created a scandal when her work “Christ Crucified” (Christ crucifié), a metaphor for all the turmoil, was hung in the choir loft of the Église du plateau d’Assy (Haute-Savoie, France).
She won first prize for sculpture at the San Paulo Biennale in 1951. During the 1950’s, Germaine Richier returned to her hybrid, biomorphic creatures, playing with colour and materials. She created polychromatic sculptures in bronze and plaster. In addition to her work as a sculptor, Germain Richier made prints, participating in a number of group exhibitions dedicated to this media, and winning awards for her work. In 1958, she took her place alongside Laurens, Lipchitz and Zadkine in the exhibition "Quatre Sculpteurs" (Four Sculptors) at the Palais de la Méditerranée in Nice.
An artist with an astonishing capacity for work, an artist of the studio, Germaine Richier died in Montpellier in 1959. In 2000, a work by Germaine Richier was installed in the sculpture park in the Tuileries Garden in Paris. She once wrote, “Life does not always belong to serene things.”

“When the act of creation is as sharp, even as cutting, as that of Germaine Richier, it is difficult not to talk about ‘cruel’ art, and I hope that she will forgive me for having done so.” - André Pieyre de Mandiargues

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