(b Paris, 10 June 1911; d Paris, 19 Jan 1977). French sculptor and tapestry designer. His parents were of Italian origin and he spent most of his youth at Reggiolo in Italy, where he began to learn the trade of blacksmith. After living from 1928 to 1930 in Nice, where he also worked with an Italian decorative sculptor called Chiavacci and took evening classes at the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, he moved to Paris to do his military service in 1930 and from 1931 studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In 1937 he assisted Robert Couturier on the decoration of the Pavillon de l’Elégance for the Exposition Universelle, but he began to find himself as a sculptor only while in Grenoble from 1940 to 1945 during the German Occupation, with the encouragement of the Director of the museum there, Andry-Farcy, and the abstract painter Henri-Jean Closon (1888–1975); he then turned to a more avant-garde style that became increasingly abstract although still based on the human figure, as in Grief Crouching (marble, h. 280 mm, 1943; see Carandente, p. 35). On his return to Paris in 1945 he was closely associated for some years with Constantin Brancusi, Jean Dewasne, Jean Deyrolle, Serge Poliakoff and other leading post-war abstract artists. His abstract sculptures are mostly of an extremely pure, almost crystalline form and are executed in various kinds of stone including marble, or in highly polished bronze (e.g. Sphere, h. 650 mm, 1947; Paris, Pompidou). He also carried out commissions for churches and public monuments, including a huge Monument to the Resistance (concrete, 15*20*4 m, 1973) on the Glières plateau in the Haute Savoie near Annecy, and he designed a number of abstract tapestries, such as Nocturne (1970; see Carandente, p. 118).