In April 1911, Bourdelle wrote to friends: “I am contemplating making a new large figure so as to not lose the habit, and without haste, for I have models ready for ten years1.” This new contemplation gave rise to the Dying Centaur, of which there are two versions, one with, and one without, a beard. This masterpiece is a transposition of Death of the Last Centaur, a fresco Bourdelle was currently working on for the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées and which he admitted was “closest to [his] sensibility.” It reveals all the symbolic charge which the sculptor invested in the half-man half-horse figure, a veritable metaphor of the creator grappling with his material. The first small study, modelled in 1911, consists of the figure of the centaur, but when he created the sculpture in the round, Bourdelle modified the position of the arms and added a lyre. This study impressed the Mayor of Buenos Aires, Jorge Lavalle Cobo, who commissioned a monumental version in bronze in July 1912. At the beginning of 1914, Bourdelle finalised the intermediate model and then, in June of that year, he put the finishing touches to the full-size clay model and the moulding of the Dying Centaur. Cast by Rudier in 1915, the first bronze proof was sent to Buenos Aires in September 1916, where it remains to this day. When Bourdelle died on 1 October 1929, his coffin was placed below the plaster of the fabulous creature that his widow had returned to the sculpture studio.
“The dying Centaur takes on a new meaning,” wrote Claude Aveline. “[…] It seems to have been conceived for the sole purpose of being here this evening, in this place.” This place within the studio-museum has been dedicated to contemplation ever since.
Jérôme Godeau
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