Head of Madame Millet (Millett, Madame - tête)

From 1911–1925, Bourdelle produced a whole series of female busts that made him one of the modern craftsmen of polychrome sculpture. Following in the footsteps of Rodin, who had invited Jean Cros (1884-1932) to translate some of his sculptures into pâte de verre (notably the Masque de Rose Beuret and Masque d'Hanako), Bourdelle also turned to the ceramicist and master glassmaker. In June 1917, he commissioned him to create a pâte de verre portrait of a wealthy American woman, Irene MacNeal, who shortly afterwards became Mrs Stephen Millet. Bourdelle had modelled her bust in coloured plaster (1916), as he had also done for those of Mme Zetlin (1911) and Mme Alcorta (1915).  Unlike Rodin's masks, in which the glass colouring produces the disturbing illusion of life, Bourdelle rejected any form of confusion with reality. “I saw your pastes in Rue Auber,” he wrote to Cros in September 1917. “[...] Anako (sic) the sculpture looks too much like a natural cast, and gives a too realistic impression, not enough like your sculpture and that of your father – more in the decorative sense.” Playing on the decorative nature of coloured glass powder and metal oxides applied cold and fired at 1000 ⷪF, the statuary and master glassmaker produced a uniquely different figure. The simplified modelling, fixed gaze and perfect symmetry of the composition, set on a double brick base, give this mask the hypnotic presence of a Greco-Egyptian funerary portrait.

Jérôme Godeau