Art: POEMS OF DECAY

The expansive ground floor of Paris’ Musée National d’Art Moderne looked like a specter-haunted landscape from Mars. Birdmen, ten inches tall, made up of a human thorax, bare-boned ribs and a spinal column topped by oversized beak and reptilian eyes, stared back at the spectators. A human-size Praying Mantis in female form crouched ready to spring; a Shepherd with half-decayed body tottering on three spindle legs looked more like an abandoned sheep carcass than a human figure. The reason for this nightmare in Paris last week: 82 pieces finished in the last twelve years by French Sculptress Germaine Richier.

Rated in the forefront of French art ever since she won first prize in sculpture at São Paulo’s 1951 Bienal, Sculptress Richier, 52, does not see beauty as the world usually views it. Says she: “I am more attracted by the trunk of a dead tree than by an apple tree in full bloom.” Along with such dissimilar sculptors as Swiss-born Alberto Giacometti and Brit ain’s Henry Moore, Germaine Richier takes her stand as a Pygmalion-in-reverse. Rather than working inert sculptor’s materials to the polished, lifelike perfection of idealized beauty, she clings to the magic moment of metamorphosis, when half-glimpsed form begins to emerge from mute matter.

Richier rejects the suggestion her work is morbid. Says she: “I merely try to see below the surface of things.” As an example she points to Tauromachy (see opposite), in which the sculptress has interposed a preview of destiny between the viewer and the bullfighter enjoying his moment of triumph. Explains Richier: “He killed the bull, but he knows he too is going to die some day.” By taking her inspiration from the forms the clay suggests as she works, Germaine Richier has opened the door to subconscious promptings which French critics find “disturbing, irritating, but teeming with life.” As a result they classify her as “a sculptor-poet in an age of sculptor-architects.”