THE DEVIL WITH CLAWS
GERMAINE RICHIER, 1952
Follow the wire. It runs from the creature's hand, through the open space of its body, down to its foot. There's one on the other side, too. Actual wire. Pulled tight. You'll miss it for a second. Then you can't unsee it. This is Germaine Richier. 1952. And right around now she starts doing this thing: running wire through her sculptures. Before this, her figures stood the way sculpture is supposed to stand. On their own. Then suddenly the body is caught inside these lines. OK. First read: trap. Cage. Something holding the figure in place. But look again. Those lines also look like plumb lines, the tool sculptors use to check if a figure is hanging straight. So the thing trapping the body is also the thing measuring it. That's very Richier. Now look at the creature itself. Pointed head. Spider hands. Bent body. Reaching two ways at once. You honestly can't tell if it's pulling against the wires or hanging from them. Probably both. And she knew this stuff from the inside. She trained with Bourdelle, who'd worked for Rodin. She could make a textbook bronze in her sleep. The proper upright body, standing nicely on a pedestal. But this is 1952. Postwar. A proper standing body wasn't enough anymore. So she makes this. Half-human, half-creature, rough all over, standing on a block that feels less like a pedestal and more like a piece of ground. She once said her bronzes were like ancient figures pulled out of the sea. Bodies that had already been through something before you ever got to see them. That's exactly what this feels like. Not broken. Not whole. More like a body that survived one disaster and got caught in something else right after. She took the old tools, bronze, balance, the upright figure, and used them to make something that looks measured and trapped at the same time. She didn't abandon sculpture. She made it nervous.