L'Orage

Germaine Richier started work on L'orage (The Storm) in 1947, employing a professional model, the eighty-year-old Nardone, who had previously served as a model for Auguste Rodin’s famous sculpture Balzac. Like that work, L’orage embodies masculine power and Richier went on to create a feminine counterpart in 1948: L'ouragane (The Hurricane). Richier’s sculpture is essentially a tribute to all those who survived the violence of the Second World War. Made during an era when the philosophy of existentialism predominated in France, the work symbolises the struggle between life and death. Some critics at the time saw death as the major theme of Richier’s work. Others, however, saw it as a metaphor for survival. Richier herself said of her work: ‘It seems to me that works that express violence incorporate sensitivity just as much as poetic works. As much wisdom can be found in violence as in tenderness.’