Pallas, torso (Pallas-torse)

1900-1905 were decisive years for Bourdelle, who deliberately turned away from the feel and style of Auguste Rodin's work. In July 1903, he created a life-size female torso in clay, topped by a head, whose face – which may, in fact, have been a portrait – wears a rather severe expression. Pallas (from the Greek name meaning ‘young girl’) is one of the epithets of the goddess Athena, the virgin warrior. In 1905, Bourdelle produced a translation in marble and bronze, which he exhibited at the Galerie Hébrard in Paris. This monolithic, virginal, synthetic marble of Pallas is indeed the torso of a goddess. A key marker in the evolution of Bourdellian creation, this work is a veritable lesson in purity, the logic of which Constantin Brancusi would push to the point of abstraction. The body is a perfect cylinder, resting on two cut-off cylinders for the thighs. The arms are two more cylinders, broken off at the ends, like fragments of an ancient sculpture. This geometric construction owes a great deal to Cézanne's school of visual art, with a desire to reconstruct the form unravelled by Impressionism, to re-establish the density of volumes. It was also inspired by pre-Classical Greek archaism, whose “rudimentary” forms fuelled the trend towards Western primitivism on the threshold of the 1910s. This manifesto remained in the sculpture studio, part of the initial donation that founded the museum in 1948.

Jérôme Godeau