Robert Couturier, image ©J.F Bonhomme
Couturier developed his visual language at the end of the 1940s, parallel with Giacometti. It is based on the elongation of bodies, a linear and sinuous canon, which may evoke Matisse's La Serpentine (1909) or Bourdelle's Le Fruit (1907). This elongation, a distant legacy of Romanesque but also Etruscan aesthetics, is in no way a mannerist temptation but rather expresses tension in the plasticity of the body, a reflection about proportions.
Couturier emerged from the tyranny of naturalism without falling into abstraction. In this, Couturier distanced himself from a whole group of figurative or abstract artists composing by mass (Maillol, Otto Freundlich, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Henri Laurens, Ossip Zadkine, Morice Lipsi, Manolo, Henri Moore...).
Robert Couturier at his studio
Robert COUTURIER
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
Made from a piece of plastic used as a mould, these variations feature women's bellies and backs and men's torsos. Many show pubic hair, head of hair, or sensual breasts. This aspect of Couturier's work is interesting because it is unfamiliar. Dos d'une blonde, which was editioned in patinated lead, can particularly evoke the moving back of Ingres' La Baigneuse de Valpinçon.
While the painting places the female nude in a narrative framework, it is merely allusive in Couturier's piece. The monumentalised back is only an erotic promise, a modest passage towards nudity. Couturier places the viewer near the motif that brings the convexity of the body to its highest expression of sensuality, like a woman's belly. Here again, the artist plays with the principle of inversion, so dear to his thought.
Extracts from The Invention of a Body
Claire Maingon
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Etienne-Martin, Robert Couturier「形态的诗与哲」
Etienne-Martin, Robert Couturier「形态的诗与哲」
