Wasted Head of one of the Mummies of Saint-Michel, Bordeaux (Oeuvre de jeunesse)

Bourdelle was familiar with the work of Victor Hugo, and haunted by the writer's “formidable pages” as well as by the “black light” of his drawings. For Bourdelle – as for Hugo – the search for the right word was inseparable from the challenges of the sculptural arts.
Forty years after the poet visited Saint-Michel Church in Bordeaux, a young Bourdelle ventured into the mummy crypt: “My dear parents, please keep the drawings I am sending you [...] – the vault contains 60 to 80 corpses preserved by a special intact soil [...]. I stayed there alone for 3 or 4 hours with two candles, and drew several heads [...].” (Letter from Bourdelle to his parents, circa 1883).
Despite the request at the start of the letter, only this drawing of the Wasted Head has come down to us. But the inks and charcoals of the open-mouthed faces in Works of Youth are inspired from the same source. And who can say whether the plaster and cast iron of the Screaming Faces (1898-1899) on the Montauban War Memorial perpetuate the memory of that sepulchral encounter?

Jérôme Godeau