Madeleine Charnaux was just 15 when she posed for this astonishing sculpture. The artist reduced his student's graceful body to a simple interweaving of geometric elements. The figure, pinched at the pelvis, creates a clean, synthetic outline. The legs are reduced to a slightly curved parallelepiped, topped by a trapezoid-shaped bust. The tapered folds of the garment accentuate the long-limbed fragility of the adolescent under the artist's scrutiny. The body is no more than a succession of elementary shapes. Bourdelle freed himself from resemblance to build an immemorial figure, a modern descendant of the Cycladic idols. Beneath the outer layer is a framework – the artist always behaved like an architect – that abandons detail to achieve the general. Against the transience of the present, he immobilises time.
With his Madeleine Charnaux, Bourdelle played on an exaggerated elongation which the sculptures of his student Alberto Giacometti were soon to reinvest with new meaning.
Colin Lemoine
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