Lambert-Rucki, singular master of sacred art

Hyères (Var). Perched on Costebelle hill, the chapel of Notre-Dame de Consolation was rebuilt between 1952 and 1955 and decorated with sculptures by Jean Lambert-Rucki (1888-1967). We can see it in the distance from the terrace of the Templar tower, behind the back of The Annunciation (around 1938), a large bronze with polychrome patina [voir ill.]. To celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the chapel, gallery owner Jacques De Vos, specialist in 20th century arts, collector of Lambert-Rucki and publisher of his bronzes, is presenting an exhibition of around fifty works, mainly sacred art.

Trained at the School of Fine Arts in Krakow (Poland), his hometown, Jan Rucki joined his friend Moïse Kisling in Paris in 1911 and immersed himself in the bustling artistic life of the French capital. In 1913 he shared a workshop with Amedeo Modigliani and exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants, while he earned a little money by retouching photographs and even playing comedy at the Odéon theater, under the direction of André Antoine. The oldest work presented in Hyères is a watercolor and gouache on paper, The Saltimbanques (1918), already imbued with an Art Deco spirit.

The artist is now called Jean Lambert-Rucki: Jean Lambert is the name he adopted when he joined the Foreign Legion in 1914. In 1916, in Salonika, his mission was to restore the frescoes and mosaics of the Sainte-Sophia church. Returning to Paris at the end of the war, he recovered the works he had entrusted to his friend Léopold Survage and, from 1919, exhibited at the Salon d’Automne and at the Indépendants. In 1920, he participated in the first exhibition of the Section d’or. If we want to detail the influences assimilated by the artist in his thirties, we must list Polish popular art, African art to which Modigliani introduced him, Byzantine art, cubism and surrealism.

In 1923, a collaboration with the lacquerer Jean Dunand began, which allowed him to develop a very personal style in the Art Deco vein, mixing summary but extraordinarily expressive characters with all kinds of animals depicted with tenderness.

Deeply attached to the Catholic religion, Lambert-Rucki turned to sacred art in the mid-1920s. Prostration (1925-1928), from which Jacques De Vos made a bronze with application of black lacquer and eggshell, represents a Virgin and Child before whom a woman bows. The artist cherishes Saint Francis whom he paints and sculpts, represents Mary Magdalene and often Christ in the different stages of the Passion. The hieratic Great Shepherd (around 1938) of polychrome plaster, with the little dog sheltering under a section of his tunic, is perhaps also an evocation of Christ.

Constantly renewing his style in sculpture, Lambert-Rucki is a singular artist whose drawings and paintings, often very powerful, must also be looked at with attention. Christ and masks (1939), still life premonitory of the horrors of the Second World War.