Germaine Richier: La Chauve-souris (1946)
Dimensions: 89 x 91 x 59.5 cm
Theodore Roethke's uncanny verse, The Bat, brings to mind many things; D. H. Lawrence's own poetic encounters with bats; Dick Kulpa and Bob Lind's journalistic fiction, the Bat Boy; and, of course, Germaine Richier's terrifying sculpture from 1946, also entitled (in English) The Bat.
Having written about Lawrence's chiropteran poetry and the Bat Boy elsewhere on this blog, it's Richier and her work I wish to discuss here ...
Having written about Lawrence's chiropteran poetry and the Bat Boy elsewhere on this blog, it's Richier and her work I wish to discuss here ...
Germaine Richier was a highly individual 20th century French sculptress. Whilst she had a rather classical approach - preferring, for example, to work from a live model before then reworking the finished piece - her work was often anomalous in theme; she loved to model spiders and insects, as well as monstrous human-animal hybrids. After the War, her style became less conventionally figurative; the bodily deformations that often characterized her work became ever-more accentuated and extreme in an attempt to convey her ever-greater sense of existential angst.
Her Christ figure, for example, although originally commissioned by the Church and designed for the Chapel of Assy, caused outrage and was eventually removed by order of a bishop, who objected not only to the fact that the body of Christ was indistinguishable from the Cross on which it hung (the wood and flesh having fused into one object), but that the figure was also faceless (readers of Deleuze and Guattari will understand why this is so profoundly problematic).
Interesting as this work and the controversy surrounding it are, it's her experimental 1946 piece, La Chauve-souris, that fascinates me most, however, created shortly after returning to Paris from Zurich, where she and her husband had spent the war years. In making The Bat, Richier employed a new technique of dipping rope fibre in plaster, before then draping it over a metal frame.
As indicated, Richier had a real penchant for portraying (usually female) figures with insect or arachnoid characteristics. But this work was the first time she'd attempted to produce a mouse with wings wearing a human face. Just looking at the small, recognisably human head atop the elongated neck of this creature gives me the willies, in the same way that Roethke's poem creeps me out.
For like her American contemporary, Richier seems to have a great love for things belonging to the natural world, but it's a love that goes way beyond nostalgia for her childhood in rural southern France that some critics insist upon. Richier, like Roethke, appears to have discovered an unsettling, Lovecraftian truth about the latter - what we might term the perverse immorality of nature; the fact that nature is paradoxically invested with elements that are unnatural and preternatural (just as we also contain within our humanity aspects that are nonhuman, inhuman and, perhaps, overhuman).
What excites Richier as an artist, I think, is not the fact that things naturally evolve, but that they are also subject to a process of becoming, with this latter understood not as the slow unfolding of an essence towards fixed identity, but the affirmation of difference conceived as a multiple process of transformation and an opening up of the self to outside forces (be they animal, alien, or daemonic in character).
And this, of course, is what excites me about her ...
Notes
To read part one of this post on Theodore Roethke and the unheimlich, click here.
To read the post that anticipates or prefigures this one on Roethke and the Bat Boy, click here.
To read the post on D. H. Lawrence's becoming-bat, click here.
To read Roethke's poem The Bat, click here.
Thanks to Diana Thomson for suggesting this post by pointing me in the direction of Germaine Richier.
Her Christ figure, for example, although originally commissioned by the Church and designed for the Chapel of Assy, caused outrage and was eventually removed by order of a bishop, who objected not only to the fact that the body of Christ was indistinguishable from the Cross on which it hung (the wood and flesh having fused into one object), but that the figure was also faceless (readers of Deleuze and Guattari will understand why this is so profoundly problematic).
Interesting as this work and the controversy surrounding it are, it's her experimental 1946 piece, La Chauve-souris, that fascinates me most, however, created shortly after returning to Paris from Zurich, where she and her husband had spent the war years. In making The Bat, Richier employed a new technique of dipping rope fibre in plaster, before then draping it over a metal frame.
As indicated, Richier had a real penchant for portraying (usually female) figures with insect or arachnoid characteristics. But this work was the first time she'd attempted to produce a mouse with wings wearing a human face. Just looking at the small, recognisably human head atop the elongated neck of this creature gives me the willies, in the same way that Roethke's poem creeps me out.
For like her American contemporary, Richier seems to have a great love for things belonging to the natural world, but it's a love that goes way beyond nostalgia for her childhood in rural southern France that some critics insist upon. Richier, like Roethke, appears to have discovered an unsettling, Lovecraftian truth about the latter - what we might term the perverse immorality of nature; the fact that nature is paradoxically invested with elements that are unnatural and preternatural (just as we also contain within our humanity aspects that are nonhuman, inhuman and, perhaps, overhuman).
What excites Richier as an artist, I think, is not the fact that things naturally evolve, but that they are also subject to a process of becoming, with this latter understood not as the slow unfolding of an essence towards fixed identity, but the affirmation of difference conceived as a multiple process of transformation and an opening up of the self to outside forces (be they animal, alien, or daemonic in character).
And this, of course, is what excites me about her ...
Notes
The version of The Bat shown above was cast in bronze in 1996; the fifth in a posthumous edition of six created under the direction of Francoise Guiter (the artist’s niece) by L. Thinot, Paris, the foundry responsible for casting Richier’s sculptures during her lifetime. It is on long term loan to the Tate (Ref. Number: L02176).
To read part one of this post on Theodore Roethke and the unheimlich, click here.
To read the post that anticipates or prefigures this one on Roethke and the Bat Boy, click here.
To read the post on D. H. Lawrence's becoming-bat, click here.
To read Roethke's poem The Bat, click here.
Thanks to Diana Thomson for suggesting this post by pointing me in the direction of Germaine Richier.
