Art Deco Sculpture "A Bird in the Hand" by Armand Godard

An Art Deco Bronze Statue by Armand Godard, produced by the Parisian foundry of Edmond Etling. This is an example of a high style rendered in the highest quality. Nothing is more emblematic of the Art Deco Era than a sculpture of a sleek, nude female form, and Godard’s are among the very finest.

He created many exquisite statues of beautiful women and dancers from exotic lands and the Follies Bergere. His work was exhibited at the Salon des Artistes Francais and at the 1937I International  Exhibition of Paris, in which he also displayed a monumental plaster sculpture in a silvered patina that stood over 14 feet tall.

Most of his pieces were commissioned by Etling and produced in bronze and ivory. Another version of the sculpture we are offering shows the same young woman with fashionable bobbed hair reaching toward a peacock.

The woman with a “bird in the hand” has a beautiful face and perfectly designed features. It is comparable to the work of his colleagues who also were represented by the Etling Foundry and had their creations cast under his auspices:  Dimitre Chiparus, Marcel Guillard, Claire-Jean Colinet, and Maurice Guiraud-Riviere, Marcel Bouraine, and Piere Le Faguays and many more.

It must have been amazing to visit the gallery of Edmond Etling on the Rue de Paradis in the 20s and 30s.  Etling commissioned and produced work by the most talented designers of the modern style in glass, metals, lighting, sculpture, and artwork. The roster of “his” artists is overwhelming. To see the vast array of spectacular pieces he represented is thrilling, but his business, tragically, was forced to cease during the German occupation. Because he was Jewish, he was taken to a concentration camp, where he died in 1940.

There are many beautiful examples of Godard’s work. We have a few on our site for sale, yet so little has been written about his life. All of his sculptures appear to have been created in the 1920s and 1930s. One can only imagine that perhaps his life and work were also ended during the war.