A producer of architectural ceramics for major Art Nouveau buildings, Alexandre Bigot also specialised in “artistic stoneware”. In 1896, Bourdelle supplied him with around 14 models, some initially designed for other materials, like the figure of The Nun, originally carved in wood. Bourdelle favoured enamelling with tones that were “gentle on the eye like some throes of autumn”. With its bluish glaze, this face with closed eyelids seems to emerge from the melancholy night water of a dream, similar to the drowned figures of Ophelia, Ondine or the Unknown Woman of the Seine. (http://expositions.bnf.fr/portraits/images/3/070.jpg) , that ‘Mona Lisa of suicide’ (Louis Aragon), whose presumed death mask appeared on the walls of artists' studios in the 1900s. “The face of sleep,” insisted Bourdelle, “rises with sudden grandeur, it is there, the noble bridge between life and death” – as though some senses had to be veiled in order to access what is beyond the present. Ensconced in the folds of her wimple, The Nun is reminiscent of Lucien Lévy-Dhurmer's ghostlike apparitions, such as the Portrait of Marguerite Moreno (1896), the Symbolist muse immortalised in her role in Georges Rodenbach's The Veil, “in this halo of cloth where the forehead takes an angelic form”. (G. Rodenbach)
Jérôme Godeau
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