The most beautiful woman in Paris is holding a tray. She
has no name. She stands outside the entrance of a popular restaurant. The
beautiful woman is holding an ashtray where smokers stub out their cigarettes
before entering the restaurant. She is a bronze woman, a statue. She is
probably French art deco or maybe art nouveaux.
The restaurant owner bought her in Morocco some years
ago, and has no information about her. Perhaps he has forgotten his initial
attraction to her and why he bought her. Today she is just an ashtray. He sees
her everyday. Every night when the restaurant and bar close, she goes inside
where she is safe.
The bronze statue is probably a replica of the work
of Max Le Verrier (1891-1973). Louis Octave Maxime Le Verrier was born in
Neuilly sur Seine where his father was a goldsmith and jeweller. His father
wanted Max to become a farmer and disowned him when he practiced drawing and
sculpting. When Max was eighteen he went to England and opened an aviation
school with a friend.
Called into the military service, his plane was shot
down in May 1915 and was sent to a prisoner of war camp in Munster. He received
the Military Medal posthumously and the Croix de Guerre 1914-1918. After the
war he studied at the Beaux Arts in Geneva.
He sculpted large and small images of women in
bronze. Often he would include a lamp, with the woman holding a dome light. In
1925 he won a gold medal for his works during his “animal period” – creating
lions, panthers, horses, gazelles, monkeys, squirrels, hippos, dogs, and birds
– often in motion.
His success, he wrote, was due to his company’s secret
metal formula, the “art cast” produced by Verrier. The metal, although not
bronze, imitated a bronze appearance. He designed statues, lights, ashtrays,
bookends and paperweights. His clean, slim, tapered lines are quite
distinctive, but probably also replicable. Whether she is a Verrier, a Verrier replica,
or something completely different, she is nevertheless fascinating and quite
stunning – and would be quite at home in a scene from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925
novel The Great Gatsby.
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