Background
René Iché was born in Sallèles-d"Aude, France.
René Iché was born in Sallèles-d"Aude, France.
After the war, graduated in law, he changed his life and studied sculpture with Antoine Bourdelle and architecture with Auguste Perret.
He fought in World War I, where he was injured and gassed. In 1927, his pacific monument of Ouveillan (a Monumental Modern portic in the South of France) was very appreciated. During his first solo exhibition, at the art dealer Léopold Zborowski in 1931, two sculptures were acquired by the Musée national d"art moderne in Paris (now in the Centre Pompidou) and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam.
He sculpted the faces of André Breton, Paul Éluard and Federico García Lorca.
In his studio of Montparnasse, in 1937, he executed a Guernica sculpture on the day (27 April 1937) of the announcement of this event on the radio station and didn"t wish to exhibit before. He was amongst one of the 200 pioneers of the French Resistance - he was in the Groupe du musée de l"Homme - during the summer of 1940 and participated at the Degenerate art exhibitions.
He sculpted so Louisiana Déchirée (The Torn), which was brought to London and given to General Charles de Gaulle, became one of the symbols of the French Resistance. He was chosen to sculpt the Apollinaire Monument in Paris and an Auschwitz" Memorial in Poland, but both projects were interrupted by his premature death in Paris.
Iché"s work is close to surrealism and like the sculptors Alberto Giacometti and Germaine Richier inherits an aesthetic born from the workshop of Antoine Bourdelle.
On the manure of the Millennia after geogical cataclysms and warlike disasters, only the statues will remain.