Germaine Richier was a French sculptor born in 1902 in Grans. She studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier and subsequently worked in the studio of Antoine Bourdelle. Richier worked with both Bourdelle and Alberto Giacometti before developing her own bronze silhouettes. Her sculptural works gained recognition early on and she began to take on students. Richier had her first exhibition in 1934 at the galerie Max Kaganovitch in Paris where she showed busts and a nude Loretto I, which was then exhibited at the Musée du Jeu de Paume in the exhibition Femmes Artistes d’Europe. She received the medal of honor for Mediterranée at the 1937 Exposition Universelle in Paris and participated in the International Exhibition of New York in 1939.
The animal, human, and vegetal worlds collide in her practice starting in 1940 beginning with her sculpture Le Crapaud. During the war, she lived in Zurich with her husband. Richier also sculpted more realistic nudes and busts. Richier returned to Paris in 1946 and continued to work on her hybrid figures while incorporating into her oeuvre the scars left by the war. The artist created L’Orage in 1947 for which she had one of Auguste Rodin’s models pose. L’Orage was presented at the XXVIe Biennale of Venise in 1952. In the same year she exhibited at the Anglo-French art center in London. Richier also experimented with the technical aspect of her works as can be seen in La Chauve-Souris, one of her most poetic pieces. This was the first time that she did not place a patina on the bronze, in order to preserve its natural state, but polished it into brilliance. After discovering the new ‘filasse’ technique, she created her Don Quichotte in 1949.
Richier added color to her bronzes beginning in 1951 and inserted colored glass. One of her most acclaimed works Le Griffu marked the start of her collaboration with painters such as Hans Hartung and Zao Wou-ki. She exhibited for the first time in the U.S. at the Allan Frumkin Gallery of Chicago then participated in the collective exhibition at the MOMA of New York where she presented La Mandoline – also known as La Cigale. Her monumental work La Montagne was presented during the retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne of Paris. The artist was also given a retrospective at the MNAM. Richier died in 1959 in Montpellier.