«The Spiral was created in clay. From this work in clay, Germaine Richier had the original plaster made, from which were then drawn the bronze proofs of the « tirage original ». The Spiral is an enlargement of The Spin (111,5 cm), coming from a shell reworked by the artist. Germaine Richier was undoubtedly fascinated by the plastics, the modeling, the wrapping of the shell around its fixed point, on which she transposed the entire network of her architectures of construction lines, her verticals, her horizontals, coming out from a fixed point too. The Spin was achieved while she was preparing her exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in 1956. There, the sculpture will there be presented in the midst of her works “like her leaded wires”, she told me. The Spiral breaks away from the proportions of Germaine Richier’s works, that are her own, the entirety of her sculptures never exceed a certain level. Fascinating proportions which, placed in either a small or large space, always maintain their human scale with their life, their intimacy, their human presence. In a little space, they are not too big, in a large space, they are not too small. After the 1960’s, just as for Calder, Picasso, Mirò, some oversized sculptures could have sprung in Germaine Richier’s work, the Spiral (2,88 m) might have announced it. This could have been the case, among others, with the ‘Claires-voies’ series. » Françoise Guiter
« The spinning, or spiral, movement is not new to Richier’s work. It was already present in ‘L’Epi’, ‘Le Grain’, of 1955, and most importantly in ‘La Jeune fille à l’oiseau’, created in 1954. The Spiral’s head alludes to the shapes of the drill, which serves in sculpture for piercing tough materials. The same type of tool, in a helical form, was suggested too, in 1956, in a small bronze of the ‘Claire voie’ series, in which Richier retrieved the sharp character of her ‘Guerriers’ of 1953. However, ‘Claire Voie No 1’ in its shape was closer to the scalpel, or to one of the sculptor’s tools such as the chisel, the spatula or the scraper, than to the triangle of the bayonets. Yet it is quite meaningful that Richier went back in 1956 to creating a new series of her peculiar and unsettling little combat beasts, under the precise same generic title, ‘Guerrier’. ‘Claire Voie’ nevertheless takes more from the dancer than the warrior. This doesn’t mean that she is less dreadful, with the spinning movement of her bronze robe, winding up to the trenchant blade composing her head, a folded and twisted leaf, broken at the level of the torso from the power of traction, and stapled to the height of the hips. The Spiral can be included in the same series. We would therefore be wrong to solely see in it an enlarged version of the ‘Vrille’. Richier herself insisted on drawing the limits to the ease given to sculptors: « an enlargement is a very delicate thing, that shouldn’t go beyond a certain threshold, and very often, we have to proceed through several steps before achieving a large version out of a small work.» »
Translation of F. Guiter, excerpt from « Germaine Richier, Rétrospective », exh.cat., Saint-Paul : Fondation Maeght, 1996, p. 178