“My nature doesn’t let me be calm; we are what we are, and age isn’t making me gentler and more serene, not that I’m fighting it: it’s with me, a part of me. The longer I’m around, the surer I am that only humans count.” - Germaine Richier

At the charged instant before an attack, The Fencer embodies Germaine Richier’s ability to invest the human figure with both physical immediacy and psychological force. The fencer stands poised, her body gathered into a state of acute concentration. The legs are flexed, the weight carefully distributed, the torso subtly articulated around an implied trajectory. Everything suggests movement, yet nothing has been released. Richier locates the drama of the sculpture in this suspended moment of physicality.

Born in Grans, Provence, in 1902, Richier received a rigorous classical training under Antoine Bourdelle at the The Grande Chaumière Academy in Paris. His influence furnished her with a formidable command of anatomy and modelling, but Richier soon began to question the heroic conception of the figure that remained central to his practice. For her, the body was neither immutable nor perfected. It was permeable to experience, susceptible to violence and change, and capable of moving between states of physical and psychological being.

Her own description of the process is telling: “I had always wanted to do sculpture. Without painting as a transitional stage. I didn't draw. What excited me was building.” Sculpture, for Richier, was an act of construction as much as representation. The figure emerged through the physical engagement of the artist with her material, and the marks of that process remained integral to the finished work.

The subject of the fencer offered an especially rich field for this investigation. Fencing as a discipline is governed by precision, equilibrium and instantaneous response. For The Fencer, Richier worked from a female model with pronounced muscular definition and consulted a fencing master from the University of Zurich in order to establish the accuracy of the pose. Such empirical preparation allowed her to depart from literal description with greater freedom. The technical precision of the subject became the foundation for an exploration of movement itself.

As Richier’s niece and former student Françoise Guiter observed, Richier selected the fencer “not in order to depict the theme itself, but as a pretext for a fresh study of movement.” The distinction is fundamental. Richier was less interested in recording a particular sporting gesture than in capturing the state of readiness that precedes it.

The economy of the sculpture reinforces this concentration. Unlike The Fencer with Mask, in which the fencer is equipped with the apparatus of combat, the present figure is almost entirely exposed. Only the suggestion of a fencing shoe offers a discreet reference to the subject. Richier removes the incidental elements of the sport and leaves the body itself to carry the meaning of the work: planted feet, bent legs, a controlled torsion through the torso and limbs arranged around an invisible axis of attack.

The resulting figure is both formidable and vulnerable. Its muscularity conveys strength, yet its exposed body remains unprotected. Richier’s conception of strength is inseparable from this sense of precariousness. The human figure is powerful because it is capable of action, but it is also susceptible to forces beyond its control. That tension between physical assurance and instability would remain one of the defining characteristics of her sculpture.

The sculptor César recognised this inherent force when he observed: “Germaine no more needed Bourdelle or anyone else to release this presence, this terrific tension within her. It was in Alberto Giacometti, it was in Picasso, and it was in Germaine.”

The relationship between The Fencer and The Fencer with Mask consequently illuminates two aspects of Richier’s treatment of the subject. The masked figure retains the conventional signs of the fencer, while the present work strips the subject almost to its physical essentials. Here the apparatus of combat recedes and the body assumes the full burden of expression. The contrast between protection and exposure heightens the psychological charge of the sculpture, transforming an athletic study into something more elemental.

Not just the pose, but the surface of this work establishes the tension and drama of the composition. Richier resisted the polished finish traditionally associated with bronze, allowing the irregularities of her modelling to remain visible. Ridges, fissures, incisions and roughened passages traverse the figure, preserving the tactile evidence of the clay and of the artist’s intervention.

This treatment unsettles the distinction between anatomy and landscape. The surface can suggest flesh, bark, earth or stone, while the figure itself remains recognisably human. Richier’s fascination with metamorphosis is already apparent here: the body seems subject to processes of growth, erosion and rupture comparable to those found in the natural world. In The Fencer, the effect is particularly striking because the underlying anatomy remains so firmly articulated. The tension between structural clarity and material disruption gives the sculpture its uncanny presence.

The present cast, numbered 2/6 and produced by the distinguished Susse foundry, known for their exceptional patinas, is particularly compelling in the immediacy of its surface. Its deep patination lends the bronze considerable gravity, while variations in tone animate the worked passages across the shoulders, torso and limbs. Light settles differently on every ridge and depression. As the viewer moves around the sculpture, contours emerge from shadow and disappear again, producing a subtle sense of movement within the apparently fixed form.

Beneath its formal complexity, The Fencer is defined by a sense of tension. The bronze remains motionless, but the figure never seems entirely still. Everything is held in suspension: the body, the gesture, the threat of movement, and the possibility of transformation.