| Summary: | The statue, in the way it is presented in eighteenth and nineteenth-century gardening handbooks, is a traditional object in the art of gardens, usually used as an ornament. Except for memorial statues in public parks, sculpture was generally expected to recall classical works. At the beginning of the twentieth century, French renovators of garden design, like Achille Duchêne and the Vera brothers, did not abandon this approach, even in their most innovatory creations. Statues still stood, unchanging, as the last witnesses of the classical legacy. But at the Paris Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs et industriels in 1925, the focus was on new trends in the art of gardens. Architects like Plumet, Marrast and Mallet-Stevens chose a new way to break with tradition, showing statues of modern subjects or replacing sculpture with decorative art pieces such as concrete or glass fountains. But the ornamental tradition was still in force and did not leave much room for the modernist sculptors. These last had to find more direct collaborations with architects to carry out a thorough-going reinvention of garden sculpture, in new relations with different disciplines. Jacques Lipchitz in particular worked in this way, with figures created for the Esprit nouveau pavilion and the villa l’Artaude by Le Corbusier and the cubist garden of Gabriel Guévrékian at the villa Noailles. His sculptures were a real part of the building, developing a spatial dialogue between the plastic arts and architecture and establishing a link between the building and the landscape.
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