Mady Ménier: “Ipoustéguy”

It was not until 1949 that he turned to sculpture. [Henri-Georges] Adam championed his work at the 1956 Salon de Mai. La Rose (plaster, 1m high), in which a hand embraces the void, is a prophetic work, yet it went completely unnoticed. Like all artists of his generation, Ipoustéguy was attracted by Abstraction and, above all, by Brancusi. A trip to Greece in 1962 proved to be an important step. Ipoustéguy produced large-scale figures, either alone (Le Torse, 1962; L’Homme, 1963) or in dialogue with a site (Discours sous Mistra, 1964, and the famous Alexandre devant Ecbatane, 1965, which he created in polystyrene foam and subsequently cast in iron).

In 1966, he exploited the full potential of bronze in two of his best-known works: Homme passant la porte (Man Passing Through the Door) and the very different, gleaming Femme au bain (Woman in the Bath). His life was then marked by personal bereavements, commemorated in marble: Mort du père (Death of the Father, 1968) and Agonie de la mère (Agony of the Mother, 1968).

He received commissions that were subsequently rejected, regardless of how diverse the commissioners were. His comrades in the Gauche prolétarienne (Proletarian Left) rejected a monument to the memory of the Maoist militant Pierre Overney (Mort du frère, 1968). Paradoxically, the American Catholic Church was in aesthetic agreement with the Maoists: Mort de l’évêque Neumann (bronze and marble, 1976) was denied its place in the Philadelphia Cathedral, where it appalled the clergy. All that remained for Ipoustéguy was to endure the rebuff of the French Army: his Val-de-Grâce was eventually acquired by the Kunsthalle in Darmstadt.

Germany admired Ipoustéguy more than France, where he was far from unanimously acclaimed. His Monument à Louise Labé (1982) in Lyon met with skepticism. His Monument du Bicentenaire is located in Bagnolet, in an environment that does it a disservice.

Winner of the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1977, and a prolific draftsman and illustrator, Ipoustéguy has works in major European museums (in France, Germany, Denmark, and Italy), in the United States (Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Yale University), Canada, and Israel.