Paule Pascal, sculpteur au service de l’architecture dans les années 1960-1980 dans le Gard

Abstract

Paule Pascal was born in 1932 and was 15 years old when she entered the Nîmes school of fine arts. She entered the Paris school of fine arts (Ecole des Beaux-Arts) in 1954, where she was the pupil of the sculptor Marcel Gimond, up to 1958. On returning to Nîmes, thanks to the sculptor and architect Armand Pellier (1910-1989), she worked on the design of large-scale works associated with architecture. She enjoyed numerous public commissions and collaborated with some of the most active architects of the third quarter of the twentieth century in the Gard department. For Armand Pellier, she realised a frieze and pillars with horses and bulls of the Camargue (arena of Vauvert), abstract murals for branches of the Crédit Agricole bank and bas-reliefs or sculptures for the private villas designed by this architect. For Joseph Massota (1925-1989), she sculpted a bas-relief in Pont du Gard stone on the theme of harvests for the concrete and glass building of the centre for agriculture of Nîmes. She also worked in moulded concrete (church of Saint-Dominique, Nîmes) or in metal (an immense bird in sheet steel at the agricultural high school of Rodilhan). She particularly liked designing the monumental walls in the stone of the Pont du Gard quarr ies that she sculpted directly on the construction sites of numerous buildings and residences of Nîmes and of the new resort of Port-Camargue. She realised twelve works in the context of the artistic 1 % for school buildings in the Gard, the Hérault, the Aude and the Seine-Maritime, with the architects Chabanne, Chouleur, Agniel, Pagès, Catanèse and Pomier. Every work was different: sculptures in the round, small concrete theatres, meeting places, walls of pipes … Paule Pascal had a preference for sculptures that integrated architecture, faithful to her initial training with Pellier. Throughout her career she also remained faithful to the use of the light yellow hued stone of the Pont du Gard, that she used in a way that was at one and the same time brutal and discreet.

Keywords

• sculpture
• architecture
• Languedoc-Roussillon
• concrete
• abstraction
• steel