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In the case of all four women, there is an analogy: the rejection of contemporary society and nostalgia for origins, even if neither the society nor the origins are the same.
Barbara Chase-Riboud's interior folklore relates to a mythical past, a primitiveness which is both imaginary and real, in which a fusing of diverse cultures permits her imagination to search beyond traditional white culture to the Africa of the ancient empires, Pre-Columbian America ancient China.
One of her recent sculptures, Going to Memphis, left standing in front of the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, after the closing of the Salon de Mai 1971, looks like a time-machine for sailing up the Nile. Bathers, another important recent work, develops what was already suggested in Going to Memphis but also indicates a different tendency in her sculpture. It is a low relief of aluminium squares, placed on the floor next to each other, a little like typographic blocks of faded archaic Chinese calligraph. Hunks and tendrils of grey silk push through and are trapped in the cracks. The mood here, even more than in the wall pieces, is a kind of poetic science-ficton of the past, evoking a world one supposes is either a lost civilization, an Atlantis which has left us indecipherable artifacts, or an announcement of our own death and destruction. It reminds one of Haggard's She or Lovecraft's novels. The sculpture is disquieting in part due to the almost human effort of the silk to get free, which it sometimes succeeds in doing, only to be strangled and swallowed again between the blocks, finally to escape, defeated, trailing on the floor around the object. This sculpture has a more timeless character than the wall reliefs. It is less explicitly "African," but nonetheless expresses her desire to produce objects not only from another time, but also from another planet, like the mysterious black slab in the film 2001.
One might object that her attitude is literaly, but Chase-Riboud would not mind, because she also believes in the power of words. In addition to her sculpture, she writes poetry.
When she was 15, the Modern Museum bought her first print, as the winner of Seventeen magazine's "It's All Yours" contest, which sculptor Eva Hesse won the next year. A few years later, she was to have her first important cultural shock: Egypt, where she spent three months on a John Hay Whitney Fellowship to Rome. At that time one cannot say Egyptian art directly influenced her work, but the country fascinated her as a means to turn her back on white traditional culture and on classical Greco-Roman art, and travel back through time and space toward Africa's patrimony.
She came back from Europe having been influenced by Germaine Richier who, at that time, had an impact on many young artists, César in particular -an influence that did not last, except perhaps in the theme of the couple (Adam and Eve, 1958, for examle), which is one of the basic theme of her imaginary world.
In 1960 she completed her studies at the Yale Art School, walking the fine line between the rigor of Albers and the dash of Rico Lebrun. At the end of the year, after the execution of an architectural commission (a monumental fountain for the Wheaton Plaza, near Washington D.C.) she left the U.S. and subsequently stopped working on sculpture for 5 years. During this time she traveled with her husband, photographer Marc Riboud (currently exhibiting his photos of China at the Metropolitan Museum). Of all her trips, from a human as well as an esthetic point of view, the one to China was the most remarkable: she remembers in particular Peking, Sian and inner Mongolia.
When, in 1965, she began to work again, she turned towards Surrealism, introducing natural elements like plants and bones into her sculptures. In 1966 she had an exhibition in Paris on the theme of the couple: drawings and sculptures where opposite forms confront each other with sensuality and aggressivity, in a language approaching Ernst's or Mueller's. In an interview-preface for the exhibition she said that the idea of the couple fascinated her because it was "banal and impossible, the need to join opposing forces: male/female,

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