Bacchante with Grapes, First Composition, large, polychrome version (Bacchante aux raisins - première composition, grande version, polychrome)

Tottering under its garland of grapevines, this Bacchante with Grapes was one of Bourdelle's favourite works. In September 1916, the sculptor sent the writer Émile Verhaeren the following letter: “Here for you, my dear Verhaeren, is my primitive bacchante [...] the young fruit of the slow labour of a lifetime”. As a token of friendship, Bourdelle gifted plaster casts of his “primitive bacchante” (sometimes coloured by his own hand) to a small circle of close friends, including the dancer Isadora Duncan, writers Anatole France, André Suarès, Elie Faure and art critic Gustave Geffroy. Created around the same time as Fruit, this Bacchante with its “unsmooth stomach” is similar in the generous size of its pelvis and gracefulness of its small apple-shaped breasts. It differs in the wild freshness of the tilted hips, the proliferation of the grape bunches, and the bumpy form of the belly, where the lessons of Rodin can be seen. The skin tones contribute greatly to the vibrancy of the plaster and the spellbinding poetry of the ‘wildness’ that Gauguin was the first to want to recapture. However, when Bourdelle sent a Bacchante to Gustave Geffroy, his accompanying letter stressed the need to return to the “laws of construction”, to a “framework [...] revolving” around a gaping void – a tension between empty and full that was masterfully reiterated the following year with Hercules the Archer.

Jérôme Godeau