Germaine Richier - The Eagle
Trained in the classical sculptural tradition, Germaine Richier had the famed seventy-one-year-old model Libera Nardone pose for her, but transformed scaffold and attached face mask beyond likeness into The Eagle. Neither a member of a Surrealist group nor a practitioner of its chance methods, she nevertheless considered herself surrealist in that tendency towards transformation, her production of irrational, hybrid beings—monsters, bird men, and plant woman—in the continuing age of uncertainty that followed World War II. She drew attention to her means with the inclusion of her tools and sensuous, agitated, and highly tangible modeling of clay. The decay suggested by the puncturing of the support and the head seems contradicted by the vitality suggested by the bird’s rise and face’s still fleshy remnants. At once broken and alive, impaled and transcendent, The Eagle is both ancient, heraldic mask and quaking semblance, loud with interior, shocked silence.
Barbara C. Buenger