Dance of the Hanged Men (La danse des pendus, pour illustration)

“You have endowed the sky of Art with one knows not what macabre ray; you have created a new frisson.” (Letter from Victor Hugo to Charles Baudelaire, 6 October 1859).
Baudelaire took pride in the consecration of darkness that Victor Hugo had sent him. The halo of this macabre ray projected its strange reverberation onto a whole generation of writers and artists, starting with Félicien Rops, who transposed Baudelairean satanism into sculpture. The skeleton, the devil and death became part of his repertoire.
Turning and swaying in the wind This danse macabre created by Bourdelle in 1885, appeared around the same time as his Hanged Men series of drawings and the Face of the Damned. These images reveal a kinship of darkness with the prints of Félicien Rops and the Luciferian images of the author of the Flowers of Evil (Baudelaire). The spell of the Baudelairian spleen, the temptation of the shadows and its trail of demons never ceased to haunt the young sculptor, tormented by the anguish of the artistic “grand design” to be accomplished and the burning thirst to make his name.

Jérôme Godeau