ROBERT COUTURIER
CELEBRATES HIS 100th BIRTHDAY AT THE
MAILLOL MUSEUM
And Horvat photographs Couturier...

Robert Couturier celebrates his 100th birthday this year. It is the first time a French artist celebrates his centennial by accompanying an exhibit of his work. His last retrospective had taken place at the Monnaie de Paris in 1975. This one brings together about a hundred sculptures and twenty drawings - from different private and public collections, galleries and the artist’s personal collection - that span over his long career, initiated at the beginning of the twenties and that has continued until the beginning of this century

Renew the representation of man

Robert Couturier is the last representative of French sculpture from the 50s, from a generation of artists - Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti - that chose during WW II to turn towards man and renew his representation. The artist was quickly remarked in his beginnings. Aristide Maillol, who became his teacher and friend, was seduced by what he called the awkward aspect of his sculpture. His first sculptures, with large and generous volumes, bear the trace of his master’s influence. Feminine nudes became his principal source of inspiration, and he never ceased to interpret them throughout his life. He received his first public commission for the International Exhibition of Arts and Techniques in Paris in 1937, and created for the occasion Le Jardinier (The Gardener), the only masculine figure in this feminine ensemble.

An art that suggests rather than represents

During the war his work offered different aesthetics, breaking away from Maillol. Following the war he oriented his work towards long figures, of thin bordering on skeletal lines. The works from the 40s and 50s show sculptures of great formal balance, built according to a geometry of forms made up of very simplified plans and volumes. Robert Couturier gave increasingly growing importance to the void that structures the figure and makes it. With time his sculpture became an art of suggestion rather than of representation. He defines himself more as a designer of sculpture than as a modeller, and gives preference to lines over masses. His last works are the living proof of his incredible vivacity and the renewal of his creation. This may include small constructions made of recuperated and recycled objects, as well as monumental sculptures.

Illustration: Robert Couturier, La Pensée (The Thought), 1946 Plaster, 46 x 12 x 8cm. Artist’s collection. Photograph Frank Horvat

Frank Horvat’s look

Robert Couturier’s long career is the coexistence of diverse forms of language –stretched out, hollow, full - as numerous as the interchangeable means of expression that reiterate his will to refuse to be linked to one same style. The most diverse materials coexist in time: stones, plaster, bronzes and assembly sculptures made with all sorts of supports gathered at random along his encounters. The exhibit also includes, facing Couturier’s sculptures, twenty photographs by Frank Horvat, a major figure in French photography. These photographs of sculptures, which also make up the catalogue’s iconography, present the work of a photograph artist on that of an artist sculptor. Frank Horvat invites us to read Robert Couturier’s sculpture in a different way and also offers us his own perception of the artist’s work.

Illustration: Robert Couturier, seen by Frank Horvat
To see more pictures, click on VERSION FRANCAISE

PUBLICATIONS:

HORVAT photographie COUTURIER.Textes de Dina Vierny, Frank Horvat et Valérie Da Costa . 24,5 x 33cm, 230 p., 54 ill. col. Soft cover .Copublication Éditions Gallimard / musée Maillol: 35 €
COUTURIER, un regard sur la vie. A film by Dominik Rimbault Collection DVD du musée Maillol