90 - Germaine Richier

Germaine Richier (French, 1902-1959) La Sauterelle, Moyenne, 1945 bronze with dark brown patina signed G. Richier and numbered 6/8 (on base); also bearing a Valsuani foundry stamp (on base) height: 20 3/4 in. (52.7 cm) Property from The Estate of Arthur Schleifer, Jr., Boston, Massachusetts This lot is located in Philadelphia. height: 20 3/4 in. width: 17 1/4 in. depth: 27 in. The sculpture is in overall very good condition. There is some slight dust accumulation and scattered spots of soiling throughout. There is some slight loss to the patina at the back of the base, on the figure's right side. Additional images available upon request. Provenance: Galerie Creuzevault, Paris. (Presumably) Galerie Hervé, Paris. Acquired directly from the above c. 1960. Literature: F. Guiter, Germaine Richier, Vie et œuvre, Catalogue raisonné, Vol. I, Milan, 2024, pp. 480-483. Lot Note: Germaine Richier occupies a singular place in twentieth-century sculpture, transforming the human figure through a language of fragmentation, hybridity, and organic abstraction. Trained in the studio of Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, Richier developed an early mastery of the figure before moving, in the years surrounding the Second World War, toward increasingly strange and fantastical forms that merged human and animal anatomies. Her sculptures of the 1940s are populated by hybrid beings- part woman, part insect, bird, or plant- through which she challenged conventional ideals of beauty and the human form. Conceived in 1945, La Sauterelle, Moyenne belongs to this pivotal period and is among Richier’s most emblematic creations. The work depicts a crouching, grasshopper-like figure whose elongated limbs and angular body appear poised between stillness and sudden movement. Its anatomy is at once recognizably human and unmistakably insectile: the torso bends forward, the head rises from a heavily textured neck, and the long, attenuated limbs extend outward as though preparing to spring. Richier’s dark patina and roughly worked surface further blur the distinction between figure and natural material, giving the bronze the appearance of something excavated, weathered, or grown rather than conventionally modeled. The Sauterelle emerged from Richier’s fascination with the insect world, particularly the creatures she encountered in the landscapes of southern France. In her sculpture, these forms became vehicles for a broader exploration of metamorphosis and the instability of physical identity. The grasshopper, traditionally associated with lightness and flight, is rendered here as a powerful, earthbound presence: tense, angular, and almost skeletal. Its precarious balance creates a palpable sense of latent energy, as if the figure might at any moment spring from its base. La Sauterelle, Moyenne is particularly significant within Richier’s development, marking the emergence of the hybrid vocabulary that would become central to her mature practice. Richier produced three principal versions of the subject- the petite in 1944, the moyenne in 1945, and the grande in 1955–56- each exploring the tension between animal and human, stability and movement. The present sculpture is one of an edition of eight bronzes. In La Sauterelle, Moyenne, Richier transforms the familiar figure of the grasshopper into something at once primitive, uncanny, and profoundly alive. The work exemplifies her radical reimagining of the sculptural figure in the immediate postwar period, when the integrity of the human body itself had become a site of profound artistic and existential questioning. Rather than depicting the body as an idealized whole, Richier makes it unstable and metamorphic, suspended between human, animal, and natural forms. The result is a sculpture of remarkable physical tension- rooted to the earth yet seemingly ready to spring into motion.