During her stay in Switzerland, Germaine Richier walked in the Valais. The woods and the leaf of the hand of the forest man were collected on this occasion. The Forest Man was probably the first work of the sculptor to benefit from these elements collected in nature. The result was so successful that Richier gradually built up a grammar of the places she had loved, asking her brother, for example, to send her an olive branch from his native region. But Richier had nothing to do with Ready Made: his additions were reworked with earth, uncovered, reshaped until they fit perfectly into the whole. Perfectly? this was the opinion of René de Solier: "the webbed hand of the forest man, this amphibious hand, is like a graft of the reverse; a proof of the unexpected evolution of any form, as soon as the sculpture takes possession of the space. For his part, André Pieyre de Mandiargues literally found fauna in his flora: "Has one sufficiently noticed the sylvan character of his work? The man forest, you remember it, prolonged of a woody arm, accomplice of the birds, hesitating between the human and the vegetable? Erected in the middle of a crossroads of high forest, under tasks of light filtered by the sun, small solar disc, no monument would be found which joined the past to the present better than this very new simulacrum of Priape.

"I am more sensitive to a burnt tree than to an apple tree in flower.
Born in 1902 in Grans, Germaine Richier studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. A particular pupil of Bourdelle, after having followed the courses of Gigues, a former practitioner of Rodin, Germaine Richier first devoted herself to the analysis of forms. The sculptures she made at this time, most often in patinated bronze, reveal future transitions: in the modeled movement, the posture of the character or the spatulated clay. The artist thus began in a classical style before turning to a violent expressionism. In 1940 she was in Switzerland where she created the sculpture "Juin 40" which expresses her horror of the war, and "Crapaud", the first example of her interest in the animal world. Germaine Richier also exhibited "Torso I" in Zurich, the first work in which the construction frame was left visible. From 1943 to 1945, she began to mix the animal world with her human creations with "La Sauterelle Petite", and the plant world with "L'homme Forêt". With "The Spider", the artist begins a series of sculptures characterized by the presence of threads stretched and intertwined as "The Griffin". At the beginning of the 50s, semi-abstract series such as "Warriors" and "Chessboards" began. It was also during this period that Germaine Richier became very concerned with color. This questioning of polychromy, the last path taken by the artist, is characteristic of her concern for the texture of her pieces, beyond simple visual pleasure. Germaine Richier's sculptures are kept in major international museums (Paris, Zurich, Amsterdam, New York, etc.). The artist influenced a large number of sculptors, including Caesar who, like her, was very impressed by Pompeii.