René Iché

French sculptor and graphic artist René Iché was severely wounded during and gassed World War I. After the war, he studied law worked in the commercial marine office before studying sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle and architecture under Auguste Perret in Paris. From 1923 he exhibited in the Salon des Indépendants. His daughter Laurence Iché (1921-2007) later became a surrealistic poet and was often his model in his early years. He mainly worked with granite, in some cases modeling death masks for prominent French artists. From cubism, his style evolved into an expressionist surrealistic design. In 1927, he created a pacifist war memorial at Ouveillan, which was greatly respected. As a socialist and strict enemy of the war, he completed his sculpture Guernica in 1937. In 1940 he joined the French Résistance against the Nazis. In 1943 his sculpture La Déchirée (The Torn), was given in London to Général de Gaulle in exile in London and it became one of the symbols of the French Résistance. He could not complete his monument Aux Déportés d’Auschwitz (To the deportees of Auschwitz) before his death in 1954.

The bronze Étude de lutteurs à terre (Study of wrestlers on the ground) from 1945 had the dimensions of 23.3 x 45.5 x 18.7 cm. Actually, it was a study for the Old Testament wrestling between Jacob and the angel (Lutte de Jacob avec l’ange (étude)). A copy is in the National Museum of Modern Art in the Centre Pompidou.