Discover other sculptures from the Bourdelle Museum

What is identity? How can we unmask “the real head, and the sincere face” (Baudelaire)? Bourdelle the portraitist also asked himself this question, attentive as he was to the face in its essential form. Bourdelle made busts, statuettes and masks of his Chilean student Henriette Petit de Vargas-Rosas, with whom he became close friends in the early 1920s...

“Cousin of the sun. Snakes were far less petrifying than your hair. […] Medusa was extremely beautiful – so it is fair that you lend your features to this brave Bänninger […] who knows only one way to capture your charming head – in sculpture. So come to see us in the afternoon, this monument. We shall contend with your delicious, dangerous snakes.”
Ant. Bourdelle...

Created around the same time as the “modern and barbaric” Hercules the Archer, the Head of Cléopâtre is a more intimate yet key work. It is one of Bourdelle’s few directly-carved sculptures, with which he wished to return to “the material listened to [which] nudges us towards a lapidary style”. The shape is dictated in part by the striated block of stone, streaked with repetitive scratches that score the facets of the cheeks and criss-cross the forehead, above the brow bone...

The etymology of Faunus (in Latin qui favet) – “he who is favourable” to shepherds and flocks – led to the association of this fertile divinity with the figure of Pan, the half-man, half-goat shepherd god from Arcadia. A “hairy wanderer” lurking in the coolness of woods and springs, Pan chases nymphs and Bacchantes with insatiable ardour. The Latin faun also has a hybrid nature: half-man, half-goat, with horns and cloven hooves...

At the tail end of the 19th century, satyrs, fauns and nymphs were conjured up in the poetry of Pierre Louÿs, Henri de Régnier, Jean Moréas, Stéphane Mallarmé, etc. And they took shape again in Symbolist painting, in the disturbing compositions of Gustave Moreau and Arnold Böcklin, before the Nabis and the painters of the Viennese Secession in their turn converted to the paganism of Arcadia...

The Chimaera Rider was modelled in June 1929 in Le Vésinet, where Bourdelle had gone to convalesce. It is a kind of self-portrait, as despite the mythological subject, the artist has depicted himself as the rider, wearing his typical garb, the loose-fitting smock and trousers, to which he has added a cloak, flapping in the wind, suggesting that the chimaera is carrying him at speed...

Antoine Bourdelle drew many portraits of himself, but he produced very few self-portrait sculptures. In 1908, he depicted himself standing, wearing his "artist-craftsman” corduroy suit, in the form of a statuette with no arms. Around 1916, he portrayed himself in Musician, playing the organ with his head tilted back, and then produced an impressive Keystone Self-Portrait for the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes...

Wounded Life is a touching work of youth. Bourdelle arrived in Paris in 1884 and was admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts, where he was taught by Alexandre Falguière. He moved to 16, Impasse du Maine (later renamed rue Antoine-Bourdelle). In 1885, he became seriously ill and had to stop working. He was kept in the Hôpital Necker (hospital) for two months, then spent the summer convalescing in Montauban...

Created around the same time as the “bravura piece” Hercules the Archer, yet much more intimate, this small piece, as decorative as it is scholarly, was nonetheless key in Bourdelle's eyes, for he exhibited it at the Kunsthaus Zurich in 1913, the Venice Biennial in 1914, New York in 1925, and finally Brussels in 1928, as part of his major retrospective...

Bourdelle’s Romanian Woman is a sumptuous bust of a woman inspired by Fanny Moscovici (1901-1969), one of Bourdelle’s many Romanian pupils at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She also worked in the master's studio between 1925 and 1928, as an assistant in charge of carving the marbles...