1960: Consecration amid Controversy

At the 1960 edition, Couturier presented a group of works more fully representative of his sculptural research: Femme qui marche, Le Berger, La Pensée, Femme debout à la cruche, among others. He also exhibited four drawings echoing his sculptures—Léda, Satyre, Plage, and Mer.

The submissions for this edition were managed through the critic Raymond Cogniat, who secured the central room of the French Pavilion to be entirely devoted to Robert Couturier. Cogniat also proposed installing one or two pieces in the garden, outside the pavilion—a decision that extended his reflection on the relationship between sculpture and architectural space.

This participation sparked contrasting critical reactions. Pierre Restany, in the journal Cimaise, wrote with biting irony that France had placed "in the place of honor Robert Couturier, his Idylle, his Danaïde and his swimmers," while acknowledging the artist's "considerable plastic sense," before concluding that "the School of Paris offered more interesting possibilities of choice to our selectors." This ambivalent reception reflects the profound tensions that were running through the artistic scene  at the time: contemporary sculpture was struggling to gain acceptance for its new plastic approaches, especially those championed by young figurative sculptors. 

Contrary to this interpretation, Raymond Cogniat, in his essay for the catalogue, painted an entirely different portrait of the artist. He presented him as an independent sculptor, "marked by no precise influence," in the distant continuity of Maillol, while emphasizing that his work "unquestionably inscribes itself in current aesthetics and in the most personal manner." For Cogniat, Couturier belonged to the present through "this need for invention in the writing that completely renews appearances." He perceived in it a natural grace that related him to the sculptors of the gardens of Versailles, coupled with a tension and anxiety that anchored him in contemporary drama. "They are as alive as a newly formed thought," he wrote about his figures, reaffirming that in his most original inventions, Couturier "always gives the impression of respecting the truth."