Lucien Wercollier

Biography

Wercollier was arrested on 4 September 1942, a few days after the nationwide strike against the conscription of Luxembourgers into the German army. He was first held in Neimënster Abbey in Luxembourg, where the occupiers had set up a prison. Today part of his collection is kept within those walls.

He was born in Luxembourg on 26 July 1908; 28 July is sometimes given. His father, Jean-Baptiste Wercollier, was a sculptor who taught art, and his uncle, Jean-Pierre Koenig, was a well-known architect in the country. From 1924 to 1927 Lucien studied at the state crafts school, in his father’s class. He then went to Brussels, to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts (1927–1931), and afterwards to Paris, to the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, where he studied, it is thought, under Henri Bouchard (until 1933).

In 1933 he returned to Luxembourg and began teaching at the same crafts school: technical drawing and an introduction to architecture. In 1936 he married Yvonne Schmit, and they had two children. In 1937, together with August Trémont, he showed sculptures in the Luxembourg pavilion at the World’s Fair in Paris. Around then he met the painter Joseph Kutter, whose work captivated him.

After the German occupation he was told to join the Reichskulturkammer, the organisation through which the Nazis controlled artists. He refused and was forbidden to exhibit. He probably also belonged to the Letzeburger Volkslegion, a resistance organisation. The year of the demand is not firmly established: both 1940 and 1941 are given.

After his arrest he was sent to the Hinzert concentration camp in Germany, about thirty kilometres from the Luxembourg border, and then to Lublin, in occupied Poland. Members of his family were, according to some accounts, arrested as well. He returned home in 1945 (in June, by some accounts) and went back to teaching.

In 1948, with François Gillen, Victor Jungblut and Joseph Probst, he founded the group Nouvelle Équipe, which wanted to break with traditional art. In 1954 he became one of the founders of the Iconomaques, an association of Luxembourg artists who set out to promote abstract art. His early works were figurative, and the influence of Aristide Maillol and Henri Laurens is seen in them; from the early 1950s he moved increasingly towards abstract forms, in which echoes of Constantin Brancusi and Hans Arp can be heard. He liked bronze and marble best, but also worked in wood, alabaster and stone, and onyx appears too. He sold his first bronze to a private collector, it is reported, only at the age of fifty.

In 1965 Wercollier gave up teaching to concentrate on his own work. That same year the National Monument to the Strike, shaped like a lighthouse, opened in Wiltz, and he made the two reliefs on it.

His best-known work about the years of the occupation is the bronze “The Political Prisoner” (Le prisonnier politique). It stands at the National Monument to the Resistance and to the Deportation in Notre-Dame Cemetery in Limpertsberg, and a cast is shown in the National Resistance Museum in Esch-sur-Alzette. Another bronze stands on the grounds of the former Hinzert camp and is dedicated to the prisoners who died there. “Interpénétration” stands beside the Palace of Europe in Strasbourg. The sculpture in front of the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg appeared on a postage stamp in 1974. “La Vague” (“The Wave”), in marble, is on the grounds of the neuro-psychiatric hospital in Ettelbruck. “Altius” (“Higher”), a tribute to pole vaulting, stands in the Olympic Sculpture Garden at the Olympic Museum in Lausanne. For the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the government of Luxembourg donated his “Ascension” in memory of John F. Kennedy. The statuette given with the Vision for Europe Award is also based on his design.

His works are in the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris, the museum in Metz, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, the Saarland Museum in Saarbrücken, the museum in Ostend and Miami University in Ohio. He finished his last sculpture in 1998; from 1999 he could no longer complete a work he had begun. Wercollier died in Luxembourg on 24 April 2002.