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His fellow sculptor, Germaine Richier, a Frenchwoman who fled to Switzerland as the war began, took a similar approach to bronze sculpture, casting pockmarked and injured figures whose bumpy surfaces recall the corpses of Pompeii.

Scant, if any, attention is paid to other sculptors who, like Richier, attempted to modernize the human figure in the years after World War II by turning it variously angular, insectlike and ravaged or otherwise rough of surface, while maintaining an almost total — and homogenizing — loyalty to bronze.

The earliest Richier works here give a partial but engaging picture of a promising young sculptor whose initial treatment of the figure is distinctive if conventional.

These pieces suggest an independent-minded young artist confident in three dimensions and fully familiar with a figurative tradition that included not only Degas, but also Maillol, Matisse and Picasso, as well as Antoine Bourdelle, with whom Richier studied from 1926 until his death in 1929.

I don’t think that Richier would have become “a very great sculptor,” as her friend César said she was.