CHEZ COLETTE CREUZEVAULT - LA RÉSERVE, 2nd FLOOR Germaine RICHIER (1902-1959) Composition - Study for the Bronze Door, circa 1955 Paint and plant elements on canson paper glued to wood panel. Unsigned. 50 x 66 cm Provenance : Colette Creuzevault Collection, Paris. By descent. Similar work: Étude pour la Porte de bronze circa 1955, paint and plant elements on canson paper pasted on wood panel, 50 x 60 cm reproduced in Germaine Richier, Paris, Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 2023, catalog, p. 294. About the squares The squares, which are not works in their own right, were created by the artist to serve as a backdrop for her Seiches, on which she could place them and move them from one to another. This was the beginning of an idea of mobility that she wanted to give to some of her works, to give them another element of life. Sometimes several copies were made, sometimes only one, which became unique after the artist's death. Germaine Richier created relief paintings on Canson drawing paper, the size of the future square, not with clay, but with paint thickened with all kinds of plant elements, with which she created the relief and the drawing. Color was everywhere in the workshop. She then gave these sheets of paper to the Lucien Thinot foundryman, who glued them to metal plates, melted them and then set them up in squares. With great creative fever, she worked a lot on these relief-sculptures on sheets of Canson paper, which were not painted once cast in bronze. These colors applied to paper may well have been a driving force and a source of inspiration for the progress of her preoccupations with color.