The Théâtre des Champs-Élysées was built on avenue Montaigne by the architect Auguste Perret between 1911 and 1913. Its patron, Gabriel Thomas, entrusted Antoine Bourdelle with the reliefs on the façade and part of the interior decoration. He soon asked him to finalise the façade too, and the sculptor devised a sober, uncluttered design based on a vertical, tripartite structure.
The attic features a monumental frieze (in three metopes) on the theme of Apollo and the Muses: the god of the Arts is surrounded by the nine muses, who hurry towards him and stop at the sight of him. The sculpture was designed to be integrated into the architecture so that “no gesture, no plane, no shadow, no projection of the sculptures offends the wall or breaks it up”. Moreover, the sculpture contributes to the legibility of the architecture by espousing its lines.
Bourdelle was thinking monumentally: as the frieze was 17 metres above the ground, it had to be legible from a distance, and required of the artist a formal simplification, sacrificing relief and detail: everything had to be subordinated to the general line, like a construction.
As a result, the artist synthesised anatomy, hair and drapery, giving his figures an extremely graphic, almost heraldic character. At the centre of the composition, Apollo is immobile, impenetrable, eternal: his face, simplified in the extreme, with empty eyes, like a mask; his posture, torso facing forward and legs in profile obey only the demands of the composition. His meditation is materialised by the figure that wraps its winged arms around him: the proximity and twin nature of their faces means that it is both inspiration and the materialisation of the god's thoughts.
While some hailed this as a new concept, others cried Cubism: “His art is expressed in such a brute, ungainly way that it seems to us to be a monumental expression of Cubism in architecture.”
However, synthesis in no way means dryness: note the supple lines in this composition, full of roundedness, waves and curves! The composition flows rhythmically through its symmetry, echoes and repetition, making it lively and joyful. The folds in the drapes and wisps of hair have cadence like the meter of verse. The movements of the arms, legs and fabrics combine and extend, as though the pace were passing from one muse to another.
The echoes from one figure to another are facilitated by the fact that the muses are not personalised. They are depicted with no accessories, their faces are impersonal, they are nothing more than gestures, rhythms and decorative motifs. Bourdelle was inspired by the dancer Isadora Duncan: “In 1911, I saw Isadora Duncan dance. I drew around 300 likenesses and, when the work for the theatre came along, they were the great source from which almost all my marbles for the façade took their movements. […] All the muses in the frieze are she, and what a lesson in life!”
Displayed on the façade of the most modern theatre in Paris, Bourdelle's compositions had a huge impact. It is easy to imagine that Pablo Picasso had seen Bourdelle's muses when you look at Two Women Running on the Beach (1922).
Valérie Montalbetti Kervella
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