From symbolism to Art Nouveau

Being close to the Symbolist circles from Montparnasse literary cafés — including La Closerie des Lilas, where he exhibited in 1889 — Bourdelle was friends with the poets Jean Moréas and André Fontainas — one of Mallarmé’s disciples. In 1892 and 1893, he took part in the first Salons de la Rose+Croix. His work nurtured a shadow side, delving into the dark lands of the psyche where the demons and unspoken desires of Le Jour et la Nuit (Day and Night) were born... “I is someone else”, as Arthur Rimbaud famously wrote.

This figure of the double found its continuation in the ambivalence of masks. Bourdelle explored all their plastic possibilities, with the oppressive magma of the Grand Masque tragique de Beethoven (Great Tragic Mask of Beethoven), the “uncanny” Masque nô (Noh Mask), and the mask of La Chilienne (The Chilean), half-portrait, half-corpse... But all masks, which are in fact decapitated heads, inexorably lead back to Medusa, the evil Gorgon whom Bourdelle depicted in a decorative, if “petrifying”, sculpture.

Bourdelle was a proponent of the movement rehabilitating decorative arts, launched in the late 19th century. He designed several sets of models for Alexandre Bigot’s “artistic stoneware” and for the Haviland porcelain manufacture — both the Buste de Jane Avril (Bust of Jane Avril) and the mask of Le Baiser (The Kiss) are voluptuous and hazy manifestations of the “ornamental rapture” found in Art Nouveau. Undulating and serpentine, the stylised arabesque leads to all kinds of reversals, where female anatomy becomes ornament, and ornament anatomy.