This summer, the Donjon de Vez is hosting a unique retrospective dedicated to Robert Couturier (1905–2008), the last witness of a generation of humanist sculptors marked by the upheavals of the 20th century. The exhibition The Poetry of Bodies brings together nearly twenty monumental and life-size sculptures in a vibrant dialogue between medieval architecture and sculptural modernity, displayed in the garden and rooms of the Donjon.

A sweeping œuvre, in the shadow of the Donjon

In the silence of the Donjon de Vez, nestled among its age-old stones, the works of Robert Couturier take on a particular depth. The exhibition The Poetry of Bodies is not content with presenting around twenty sculptures: it invites us to see and feel the journey of an artist who made the human body — the female body in particular — his primary motif, though never a fixed one.

Couturier constantly reinvented his sculptural approach to the point that no two of his works are quite alike. Some are full and sensual, like The Back of a Blonde (1983) or The Soap (1994), with ample, voluptuous curves inspired by classical canons. Others are hollowed out, stretched, as if the material itself were seeking to breathe. The artist referred to this as an “open form,” a shape that lets air, light, and the gaze circulate freely.

What fascinates us about Couturier is his refusal to follow a single path. He alternates materials — bronze, stone, plaster, assemblages — and modes of expression: from smooth lines to fragmented gestures, from rounded figures to precariously balanced sculptures. He claimed to practice an “anti-sculpture,” not out of rejection of the past, but to open other possibilities: more suggestive, more sensory, more alive.

His work, both accessible and unsettling, calls for an active relationship with the viewer. The gaze does not merely skim; it enters the work, becomes part of it. In the heart of the Donjon, this interplay between interior and exterior, between surface and breath, becomes striking. Couturier’s art is that of emptiness shaping form, of silence becoming presence.

Maillol and Couturier: a living legacy

The encounter between Robert Couturier and Aristide Maillol in 1928 was a formative one. The young man, just out of lithography school, applied for the Blumenthal Prize. Maillol, a jury member, was intrigued. He later said he was drawn to what he called the “botched” look of Couturier’s sculpture — a fruitful awkwardness, a promising imbalance. He took him under his wing. From that meeting grew a relationship first of master and student, then of friendship marked by admiration and complicity.

Couturier’s early works clearly bear the imprint of this legacy: generous volumes, the sensuality of the female nude, a search for almost classical balance. But after Maillol’s death in 1944, the need for emancipation became urgent. Couturier declared he wanted to make “anti-Maillol” work. Not as a radical break, but as an inner necessity. Where Maillol exalted full and closed forms, Couturier sought openness, inner space, and shadows that sculpted as much as the light.

In a way, he became the last representative of that great generation of French sculptors who, in the 1940s–50s, chose to reinvent the human figure. Alongside Giacometti and Germaine Richier, Couturier helped launch a plastic renewal rooted in humanity, fragility, and suggestion. His works appeared at major international biennials — Venice, São Paulo, Antwerp — asserting an aesthetic that was unmistakably French, yet open to the world.

Though he inherited a certain Mediterranean classicism through Maillol, Couturier never turned it into a constraint. On the contrary, he passed through it, transformed it, stretched it until it took on a new shape. He was both the guardian of a tradition and the inventor of a language in which solids and voids, masses and silences, coexist without hierarchy.

The Poetry of Bodies reveals not just a sculptor, but a gaze — that of a man who, for nearly a century, never stopped questioning the human form, not to freeze it, but to make its tensions, gaps, and absences resonate.

In the singular setting of the Donjon de Vez, Robert Couturier’s works reveal all their quiet power. They speak of a bygone time, certainly, but also of a body that remains contemporary, unstable, open, and subject to interpretation.

And if this exhibition marks the return to center stage of an artist long kept in the shadows, it is also because it speaks to our time: the need for art that suggests rather than asserts, for beauty that allows doubt, for a sculptural gesture that touches without enclosing.

In the silence of his studio, Robert Couturier managed to turn sculpture into a living language — a free one. And this exhibition reminds us that it is high time we listened to it.