March 6 - July 7 2013

The springtime exhibition highlights Bourdelle’s “dark work” through a selection of early drawings, produced when the young artist’s anxiety in the grip of the “evil of the century” clashed with the certainty of the genius that carried him forward.

A creator who lacked recognition, Bourdelle spent the 1880s in a “dark period”. Tragedies and private disappointments, anxieties linked to artistic and literary ambitions nourished a melancholic and spectacular graphic production, marked by nightmarish visions and poems with Baudelarian accents.

Wounds are fundamental: this “dark work”, born from deep tensions, reveals the extreme richness of a period of teeming inquiry, a form of creative urgency between drawing and writing. Bourdelle’s graphic work ventures on the path of symbolism, naturalism and is tinged with expressionist notes. A crucial period during which Bourdelle exorcised and sublimated his anxieties in the figure of Beethoven: the portraits of the genius multiply as incarnations and doubles of the artist.

Commissioner :
Stéphane Ferrand, director of documentary studies at the Bourdelle Museum


Catalogue de l'exposition
Le Broyeur de sombre
Dessins de jeunesse de Bourdelle
Textes de Annie Barbera, Stéphanie Cantarutti, Stéphane Ferrand, Jérôme Godeau, Colin Lemoine, Pierre Pichon et Amélie Simier
Relié
128 pages, 90 illustrations
25 euros
© Paris-Musées, 2013
Editions des musées de la Ville de Paris
Diffusion Actes Sud

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