ART CITIES:Monaco-Barbara Chase Riboud

A sculptor, poet and novelist, Barbara Chase-Riboud began her training as an artist aged seven at the Fletcher Academy in Philadelphia; she was just sixteen when the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York acquired one of her first works. She studied at Temple University and at Yale, where she became the first African American woman to graduate from the university’s architecture school. Whilst living in Rome between 1957 and 1959, she created her first sculptures in bronze, and her work was featured in solo exhibitions for the first time.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

The exhibition “The  Josephines” is a tribute by  Barbara Chase-Riboud to the legendary Josephine Baker (1905 – 1975), whose transatlantic life mirrors her own. The  exhibition honors 50 years since the artist met Baker at her final performance (also the 50th anniversary of Baker’s death) and 100 years since the dancer made her debut in Paris. This landmark exhibition celebrates Baker’s enduring legacy through a striking artistic perspective, presenting works that embody the energy and elegance of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic performers. Archival material, including extraordinary photographs of Josephine Baker performing in Monaco, is presented, with the support of Archives Monte-Carlo Société des Bains de Mer. Chase-Riboud and Baker met only once, in 1975, backstage moments before her last performance at the Bobino in Paris. Chase-Riboud had been invited by her friends who opened the show, dancers Carmen Lavallade and Geoffrey Holder, who then brought her backstage to meet Baker. She recalls Baker’s transformation from a ‘little old lady’ to the larger-than-life chanteuse who had transfixed audiences internationally. In 2021, Chase- Riboud attended Baker’s induction into the French National Pantheon, the national tomb of heroes, which inspired the monumental sculptures on view.  “The Josephines” centers on two bronze sculptures from 2022 that pay homage to the legendary performer, civil rights activist and World War II secret agent Josephine Baker. Monumental in impact, these sculptures are from Chase-Riboud’s ongoing “La Musica” series, which explores music, movement and stillness through bold juxtapositions of materials and forms. Rising two meters tall, each of the patinated bronze sculptures stand upon their own stage-like platform and combines hard folds of metal and sumptuous textiles. With thick coils of silk spilling down to the floor from their apices, these abstract sculptures nevertheless conjure inevitable associations with the famously sinuous limbs of their namesake. Chase-Riboud has described Baker as ‘the epitome of movement, of jazz,’ adding that ‘The reason why I wanted to do Josephine was because it’s a leap into space.’ Reinforcing this, the artist has also associated Baker with futurism, an art movement which prioritised a focus on dynamism. Reinventing the idea of figurative statuary as monument, the artist instead proposes the sculptural embodiment of energy and movement. The resulting works, dedicated to rhythm and light, exude a commanding presence and offer a sensory journey through form, poetry and beauty. Surrounding these forms, Chase-Riboud presents a special selection of delicate all-white works on paper. Achieved through a technique the artist has developed and perfected over the past five decades, these amalgams of sculptural relief and drawing are made by piercing silk thread through Arches paper. Evoking both the cursive lines of handwriting and figurative structure of hieroglyphics, they are formally and conceptually linked to Chase-Riboud’s automatic writings and poems.

Barbara Chase-Riboud, born in 1939, describes how she resolutely turned to sculpture as a child: by the age of seven, she was enrolled in classes at the Philadelphia Museum and the Fleisher Art Memorial, where she was awarded the sculpture prize in the adult evening class section. At 16, one of her works was purchased by William S. Lieberman, despite the fact that he knew nothing about her at the time, and later gifted to MoMA; the museum now holds four of her works, one of them on permanent display. The sculpture was shown at the ACA Galleries in New York, after Barbara Chase-Riboud won a contest organised by Seventeen magazine. Determination, and being something of a child prodigy – although this implies recourse to certain kind of narrative logic, whereas the artist herself phrases it in much simpler terms: she had always wanted to create sculptures – a small Grecian-style vase at the age of seven, a woodcut at sixteen – but to her, this was an integral part of her life, her practice and her catalogue raisonné, on a par with what was yet to come and is still ongoing today. And her creations of yesterday, her childhood achievements, are no less valuable. On to the late 1950s: Barbara Chase-Riboud travels to Italy, Egypt, Greece and Turkey, guided by faith in encounters and opportunities, serendipity and daring experiments. The places where she lived and travelled to nourish a formal imagination already forged by classical sculpture and the Baroque, drawing her towards the horizons of non-Western sculpture. She has described the twelve months she spent in Italy, from 1957, as “magical”: in 1958 she took part in the first Festival dei Due Mondi in Spoleto with a solo exhibition; she sold a sculpture to an artist she admired, Ben Shahn, and met Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly, Mimmo Rotella and Domenico Gnoli. In Egypt she also got to know René Burri. To earn her living she worked at the Cinecittà Studios in Rome, mainly designing sets for Hollywood epics. By doing all sorts of odd jobs during the filming of Ben Hur she was able to set herself up and start working with the Bonvicini Foundry in Verona. However, Barbara Chase-Riboud is also a writer. As she explains, this range of artistic pursuits means that she has always managed to achieve an economic balance. In the 1970s, for instance, when she was not yet able to live off the sale of her sculptures, the success of her publications ensured a comfortable income. Barbara Chase-Riboud published her first novel in 1979, after discovering the story of Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson, the story of a relationship between an African-American slave and a former president of the United States.

Photo: Barbara Chase-Riboud, Across the Phantom Moons, 2020, Silk on Arches paper, Overall: 85.6 x 200.8 x 6 cm / 33 3/4 x 79 x 2 3/8 in (framed), Photo: Nicolas Brasseur, © Barbara Chase-Riboud, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, One Monte-Carlo, Place du Casino, Monaco, Duration: 6/3-14/6/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/