Biography

Georges Jeanclos is one of France’s great twentieth-century sculptors. His work is rooted in the traumatic events of the Second World War. To escape the round-ups that threatened French Jews, his family was forced to hide in the woods; Jeanclos, barely ten at the time, had several close brushes with death. When the country was liberated, he saw the corpses of former collaborationists strung up from lampposts; shortly thereafter, he discovered the skeletal bodies of camp survivors. Decades later, Jeanclos would respond to these seminal events: not by locking himself away in his own experience but by opening up to universality and paying attention to all forms of suffering, past and present; not by representing horror, but by finding within himself the strength to create beauty. Jeanclos’ choice medium was clay. He transformed it into thin sheets with which he then shaped human figures. Simultaneously children and adults, men and women, their faces are almost identical. Some are dormeurs resting beneath a coverlet of clay; others are hidden within urns bearing Hebrew letters drawn from the Kaddish; others are boat travelers bound for the Beyond; still others are kamakuras, meditating bonzes lost in contemplation of the soul’s gardens. To all these, Jeanclos would later add Pietas, amorous Adams and Eves, couples tenderly grazing or stroking one another other. His images reveal both the undeniable weakness of human beings and the invincible strength of love; by the simple fact of their existence, they help us to live.