Carlo Sarrabezolles, de l’esquisse au colossal

Like Molière, he died while exercising his art: in February 1971 he fell as he was sculpting a bust in his workshop and died from his injuries. He was 82 years old. The name of Carlo Sarrabezolles, a native from Toulouse, means nothing to the public today. And yet he is the inventor of a new method: sculpture directly on concrete while it is setting which he experiments for the first time in the autumn of 1928 in the church of Elisabethville, in the Yvelines outside Paris. In order to carry out big groups in relief Sarrabezelles attacked concrete just taking out of its frame and still tender. He could thus produce various characters in one single day, finish the facade of a church in a few months and apply his objective, that of making sculpture and architecture one single body. This catalogue, which accompanies a traveling exhibition (it will be in Reims at the museum of Beaux-Arts as of 16 October), retraces the various periods in the sculpture’s career, from the monuments to the dead in the twenties to the large exhibitions in the period between the two wars (at the Arts décoratifs in 1925, the colonial one in 1937), including the busts of friends and the wide scale programs, be it the Normandie liner or the Palais de Chaillot.

• Carlo Sarrabezolles, de l’esquisse au colossal, collective work, Gourcuff-Gradenigo publishing house, 2008, 192 p., 34 €, ISBN : 978-2-35340-044-7