Past exhibition
Bourdelle and the Antique: a modern passion
Du au
Full rate : 8 €
Reduced : 6 €
In the history of forms and ideas, there is no ‘advance’ that does not come from a ‘retreat’, no aesthetic revolution that does not involve the rebirth of a buried past, the revival of a spiritual and plastic heritage - in this case that of the most ancient Greece. It was here that the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle drew inspiration for the masterpieces of his maturity at the very beginning of the 20th century.
From the primordial energy of myth, fabulous figures of archaeological times - Tête d’Apollon ('Apollo's Head' 1898-1909), Pallas Athénée ('Pallas Athenaeus' 1905), Héraklès Archer ('Herakles the Archer' 1910), Le Fruit ou La nudité des fruits('The Fruit' or 'Nakedness of Fruit' 1906-1911), Penelope (1905-1912), Centaure mourant ('Dying Centaur' 1914)... - Bourdelle draws the innovative force of his ‘clean, unadorned, uncluttered work’, free from Rodin's aesthetic, the canons of academicism and the conventions of realism.
Rethought in terms of mass and planes, subjected to a process of purification and alteration, Bourdelle's sculpture gave shape to an unprecedented beauty that critics denounced, at first, as ‘a return to the idol of the savage’. Paradoxically, the very movement of this return to the ‘origin’ placed Bourdelle at the heart of the most daring explorations of modern art.
The exhibition will therefore compare Bourdelle's work with the goddesses of Puvis de Chavannes, the bathers of Picasso, the Mediterranean of Maillol and the Serpentine of Matisse - familiar, for a time, with the master's studio -, to the sculptures of Modigliani and Zadkine, to the fauns and goat-footed figures of Ker-Xavier Roussel and Maurice Denis, who both helped to create the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, to the choreographic figures of Isadora Duncan and Nijinsky who ‘danced the antique’... In the formal laboratory of this modern archaism that operated from the 1890s to the 1920s, the exhibition restores Bourdelle to his rightful place.
Curators
Claire Barbillon, professor at the Université de Poitiers and the École du Louvre
Jérôme Godeau, art historian, musée Bourdelle
Amélie Simier, head curator, head of the Bourdelle and Zadkine museum
don't miss any news from the Bourdelle Museum.
Subscribe to our monthly newsletter