Classically trained in Fine Arts, René won the Grand Prix de Rome for sculpture in 1926 and spent four years in the Eternal City at the French Academy, based in Villa Medici. Protagonist in the 1930s art-architecture integration, he was a leading exponent of the Art Deco movement and an academic, influenced by classical art due to his stay in Rome. He modelled imposing figures that were always solemn, managing to give marble 'epidermal life'.

Around 1921, he met Jacques Zwobada, who came to play cello at a concert Rene had organised for his students at the School of Fine Arts. To his sunny humanism, Jacques opposes the psychology of the shadow, tormented by introspection and an exacerbated inner life, by doubt and nervousness on the edge. 

When Rene eventually met the young Antonia it was like a thunderbolt, changing both their lives. He divorced his wife to marry her in 1933 and she followed him to Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris. Rene was so involved with the birth of their daughter, Anne, that he expressed his joy to becoming a father to every passer-by, adorning their house with a bronze bas-relief that acted as a handle on the entrance door, a decoration that depicted little Anne in swaddling clothes with her arms outstretched, posed in a gesture of peace and love. On the main façade of the house, he also fixed a sculpture of Antonia's head, a marble high relief, as if to select her queen of the house.