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Jan Lambert-Rucki, „Droga Krzyżowa”, 1939-1943, cement polichromowany, Boulogne-Billancourt, kościół Sainte-Thérèse-de l’Enfant-Jésus, photo Andrzej Pieńkos, 2013
Licencja: CC BY-SA 4.0, Źródło: Instytut Polonika, Warunki licencji
Fotografia przedstawiająca \"Stations of the Cross\" by Jan Lambert-Rucki in the church of Sainte-Therèse in Boulogne-Billancourt
Jan Lambert-Rucki, „Droga Krzyżowa”, 1939-1943, cement polichromowany, Boulogne-Billancourt, kościół Sainte-Thérèse-de l’Enfant-Jésus, photo Andrzej Pieńkos, 2013
Licencja: CC BY-SA 4.0, Źródło: Instytut Polonika, Warunki licencji
Fotografia przedstawiająca \"Stations of the Cross\" by Jan Lambert-Rucki in the church of Sainte-Therèse in Boulogne-Billancourt
Jan Lambert-Rucki, „Droga Krzyżowa”, 1939-1943, cement polichromowany, Boulogne-Billancourt, kościół Sainte-Thérèse-de l’Enfant-Jésus, photo Andrzej Pieńkos, 2013
Licencja: CC BY-SA 4.0, Źródło: Instytut Polonika, Warunki licencji
Fotografia przedstawiająca \"Stations of the Cross\" by Jan Lambert-Rucki in the church of Sainte-Therèse in Boulogne-Billancourt
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ID: POL-001192-P

"Stations of the Cross" by Jan Lambert-Rucki in the church of Sainte-Therèse in Boulogne-Billancourt

ID: POL-001192-P

"Stations of the Cross" by Jan Lambert-Rucki in the church of Sainte-Therèse in Boulogne-Billancourt

The smooth side walls of the nave, in their lower part (above the penetrations into the side aisles), are covered with scenes of the Stations of the Cross, arranged on both sides in almost continuous friezes. The individual stations have been reduced to representations with 2-3 figures, accompanied by quotations from the gospels. The colouring of the figures is limited to a few vague, greyish tones of pink, blue, yellow.

Lambert-Rucki turned to religious subjects in the early 1930s. Most of his large church commissions from France, however, date from after World War II, and the artist's popularity in this area was due to the success of his complex sculptural decoration of a church in Boulogne, near Paris. There, in a variety of materials, he executed the exterior and interior works of the upper church, the side chapels and the crypt (where he carved reliefs directly in stone). This is his largest and most iconographically diverse work, executed with the help of his wife.

The church was built to a design by Charles Bourdery from the mid-1920s, and was not completed until after 1945. Lambert-Rucki's sculptures (especially his works on the side façade and the figure in the tympanum) either harmonise with or break from the Art Deco style of the building's architecture and stained glass windows, with a quasi-folk styling closer to the realistic tendencies of the 1930s. The latter also comes to the fore in the characterisation of the human types of the Stations of the Cross. As the church was being built as the seat of a new parish in the working-class area of Boulogne-Billancourt, this stylisation may have been suggested to the sculptor by the commissioners. It was melded into a unified style with inspirations from Romanesque sculpture and miniature (frequent in his religious work), giving hieratic solemnity to the figures; with expressive late Gothic sculpture, and with a tendency towards the grotesque. Lambert-Rucki's exceptional sculptural ensemble also seems stylistically unique against the background of the explorations of French artists of the time in the field of religious art. However, it remains completely forgotten, despite the growing interest in, among other things, Boulogne itself as a lively avant-garde centre in the first half of the twentieth century, and as the site of an exceptional flowering of Art Deco. The sculptor had already taken up the theme of the Stations of the Cross in 1938 in the church of Notre-Dame-de la-Trinité in Blois, and again a dozen years after the war in a church in the Normandy village of Fiefs (also using cement in both realisations).

Lambert-Rucki is also the author of the wooden crucifix, placed next to the main altar.

Related persons:
Time of origin:
1939-1943
Creator:
Jan Lambert-Rucki (malarz, grafik, rzeźbiarz; Polska, Francja)(preview)
Bibliography:
  • A. Choubard, Un sculpteur au service de l’Eglise - Jean Lambert Rucki, Mémoire de maîtrise, 1992; www.saintetherese92.fr/art-histoire.
  • Winiarski A., Jean Lambert-Rucki 1888-1967, Konstancin-Jeziorna 2017, s. 162-163.
  • https://saintetherese92.fr/art-histoire.
  • Rysunki przygotowawcze artysty do Drogi Krzyżowej (1942, węgiel na papierze; Boulogne-Billancourt, Musée des Années 30).
Keywords:
Publikacja:
26.09.2024
Ostatnia aktualizacja:
26.09.2024
Author:
prof. Andrzej Pieńkos
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