Kelly At Large #130 Art edition
A look at the extraordinary Germaine Richier exhibit at the Pompidou Center (until 12 June 2023). What a genius. With photos.
Monday, instead of writing, I went to a Germaine Richier exhibit at the Pompidou Center (until 12 June 2023). What a genius, that sculptor who was an internationally-acclaimed artist when she died in 1959, but already MIA a few decades later when I was taking classes in art history.
Afterwards all I could do was gape. Her work provoked so many thoughts, so many feelings. I also couldn’t get over how quickly she’d been erased, though it wasn’t that surprising given that the displayed articles written by her contemporaries mostly recognized her brilliance, but also treated her like a talking dog.
One journalist marveled at how she spoke, her regional accent, the low timber of her voice that nevertheless when she laughed went up in register to create an absolutely feminine, tee-hee. Somebody else was impressed by her pants. Probably the same one by her female strength. Unlike a painter, sculptors don’t sit there on a stool, raising a brush that only weighs a few grams. For her—it was clay and rock and shining bronze. The materiality of a world she reveled in.
There weren’t any artists in her agrarian family. When she was twelve, she visited the medieval Cloisters of Saint-Trophime in Arles, saw the treasures of its sculptures, and decided then and there to become a sculptor. I don’t know what qualifications she needed to get into art school, but she did, studying with a former student of Rodin in Montpelier, before going to Paris where she worked with Antoine Bourdelle, another Southerner, who also taught Henri Matisse (1869–1954) and Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) whose muddy, thumb-printed figures sometimes seem to intersect with Richier’s.
She was up to something different, though, I think. Born near Grans in Provence in 1902, she grew up playing in her father’s small vineyard, the squat dry forests of the Midi. I don’t think she saw any difference between the mud and the humans she would portray in it, leaving traces of her fingers and her tools. Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust. Like the inescapable Roman (and Etruscan) ruins all over the region. She said once, “I like what’s tense, nervy, dry. Olive trees dried up by the wind, brittle wood… I’m more moved by a charred stump than a flowering apple tree.”
The region formed her, but so did living through the slaughters of two world wars in Europe. She spent most of the second in Switzerland with her husband at the time, working hard, missing France, coming into her own. You can see it in her ’44 sculpture Sava Alexandra which manages to offer the same realistic grace of one of Degas’ ballerina sculptures, but also… I’m not quite sure how to describe the effect. In another artist I might say their technique of leaving fingerprints, revealing the structure, was meant to remind you of the sculptural process and of the material, but with Richier I had the idea that she was pointing back towards the person, their unfinishedness and human changeability that is more than mere motion, but the rawness of emotion and of the life we each contain. I stared at that sculpture a long time, more and more aware of her side gaping with a Jesus-like wound.
I spent even more time with the next.
It had the skinny arms and legs and protruding belly of an aging man, but also the face of an African mask after the ants got to it. That made me think of Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. The body, I admit, made me think of my father. The vulnerability of the flesh. How the power we associate with sex always fades. The last time I saw him was after he crashed his car—again. I flew down from New York to Orlando. He had bruises and cuts. He’d lost weight. The flesh had practically melted from his body. I had to leave the room to gather myself. It wasn’t just him. On the way from the airport—and just a block before we reached the hospital—the Uber driver pointed out the Pulse, a gay nightclub where a certain Omar Mateen shot 49 people to death a couple months before. How fragile we are.
I’m glad I didn’t look at the title until after I’d already lingered for a while with the statue. I was surprised it was called L’Orage (1947-48), (which the exhibit translates as Storm Man instead of storm), and that the note described it as an allegory of natural forces emerging from the dawn of time. But even recognizing that there was still force in the still broad chest, I couldn’t unsee the fragility there, the fingers still spread like a child’s drawing, the stance still awkward supported by scrawny legs nothing like those of Michelangelo’s powerful, graceful David.
And why would there be power, why strength? For the work, she used Antonio Nardone, apparently the same model Rodin used fifty years before for his Balzac (1891–1897).
I think I was right to see less a dawn than a twilight, a Götterdämmerung. They’re easy to confuse.
The show is much better in person, but if you’re not in Paris you can watch a video tour of the exhibit here. (In French with English subtitles.)
There were lots of other remarkable works…
including two crucifixes, the first of which created quite a furor.
In Lesbian News
There have been several years of constant harassment, broken windows and graffiti for one of France’s last dyke bars, La Part des Anges, not by straights, not by Nazis, but by totalitarian queer activists who literally tag it as TERF.
Oxford Debating Club Also Under Attack
The organization which hosted a Provisional IRA leader, a holocaust denier and O.J. Simpson, after he was acquitted of murdering his wife, might finally go down for featuring a “mild-mannered and eminently sensible middle-aged lesbian” who believes sex is real and is sometimes relevant.
The culprits? You guessed it. Queer activists.
Free Speech
I couldn’t agree more with Salman Rushdie, who in a a video message to the British Book Awards, warns free expression is under threat. (Maybe some day we’ll also talk about freedom of association).
“Now I am sitting here in the U.S., I have to look at the extraordinary attack on libraries, and books for children in schools,” he said. “The attack on the idea of libraries themselves. It is quite remarkably alarming, and we need to be very aware of it, and to fight against it very hard.”… In his speech, Rushdie also criticized publishers who change decades-old books for modern sensibilities, such as large-scale cuts and rewrites to the works of children’s author Roald Dahl and James Bond creator Ian Fleming.
He said publishers should allow books “to come to us from their time and be of their time.”
“And if that’s difficult to take, don’t read it, read another book,” he said.
A Flash From the Past
The first female hip hop artist inducted in Rock Roll Hall of Fame, Missy Elliot made her 1997 debut with this single, "The Rain” from her first album “Supa Dupa Fly”. There’s nothing like it. There’s nothing like her.
That’s it for this time.
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Disgruntedly yours,
xoxo K