Love in Agony (L'Amour agonise)

Bourdelle's dark style was at odds, both sculpturally and intellectually, with the symbolist tendencies which were considerably reforming European painting and sculpture at the dawn of the 20th century. In 1892 and again in 1893, Bourdelle took part in the first two Salons de la Rose+Croix. These spiritualist events were organised by “Sâr” Joséphin Péladan, the grand master of a Hermetic order and an occult theosophist who strove to create a school of idealistic art and “ruin realism”.
In 1892, the artist sent a plaster of Pain (1887), 14 illustrations for Césette, the popular novel by his friend Émile Pouvillon, and this drawing which was reproduced in the illustrated catalogue. Inspired by his sculpture Love in Agony (1886), the image is a now wingless figure clothed in a veil.
The following year, Bourdelle's name appeared in the Salon de la Rose+Croix under 31 works of art, including around 20 drawings and a dozen sculptures. 
Vincent Van Gogh, Georges Seurat, Odilon Redon, Georges Desvallières and Félicien Rops never strayed far from these lethal slumbers, desolate landscapes and twilight compositions, purged of all anecdote and hope. Stripped of the trappings of naturalism and free of any description, the work responded to an eminently “modern” attempt at synthesis, as defined by Charles Baudelaire, who saw in this term the coming together of the “transitory” and the “eternal”, the “fleeting” and the “immutable”.

Colin Lemoine