Bourdelle before Beethoven

Beethoven is a complete, but also a cursed, artist.  His frenzied scores consoled and sublimated the deafness he suffered from. With him, since him, artists have scrutinised their most intimate passions and darkest nights, torments and visions, electrifying joys and metaphysical angst.

Introduction

In 1901, freed from the naturalism of his early years, Bourdelle executed his Grand masque tragique ('Large Tragic Mask'), an extraordinarily shapeless grimace which the critic Mécislas Golberg foresaw as offering "only two ways to go: nothingness or order." 

Face to Face

Abandoned by a body that can no longer hear, undone by anguish, Beethoven embodies the melancholy artist, absorbed in deep doubts and abysmal meditations. With his head heavily bowed over his folded arm, Beethoven accoudé ('Beethoven Leaning' 1903) is reminiscent of a famous engraving by Albrecht Dürer that, four centuries earlier, defined the archetypal position of the melancholic man. 

Melancholia

Beethoven is a dark, twilight star. And if Bourdelle dared to look the black sun in the face(s), he could not bring himself to deliver simple heads and masks. His sculptural researches were extremely varied and inventive. The composer sometimes appears on a rock, as a romantic idol, sometimes on a cross, as a pagan Christ. 

The silent orchestra

Although Bourdelle produced numerous variations on the face of Beethoven, he did not give up on the monumental deployment of this obsessive figure. As early as 1903, he began to represent the composer standing, on a rock or a cliff, facing the elements, perhaps recalling the photographs taken by Victor Hugo during his exile in Jersey. 

Passion

Au cours de son incessante activité de dessinateur, Bourdelle a consacré à peine quarante feuilles à la figure de Beethoven, quoique le sujet l’ait hanté continuellement. Ses premières années à Paris coïncident avec ses premières ébauches de composition pour un monument, non réalisé. Ici, seul un piano rappelle la musique. 

In the course of his ceaseless activity as a draughtsman, Bourdelle devoted barely forty sheets to the figure of Beethoven, although the subject continually haunted him. His early years in Paris coincided with his first drafts of a composition for a monument, never realised. Here, only a piano recalls the music. 

Black manners

For musicians, as for painters and sculptors, Beethoven opened the way to ‘temperament’, to pure interiority. From then on, from his sonatas and symphonies onwards, all that mattered was the depths of the soul, as the philosopher and writer Emil Cioran summed up perfectly: "Beethoven vitiated music: he introduced mood swings, he let anger in."

Romantic idol

What does Beethoven have in mind? What do the musician and the being prey to the vertigo of creation look like? In 1922, Bourdelle gave an answer in pen and brown ink, in a strange monochrome reminiscent of an etching: the composer is a man subjected to the torments of the soul, closed in on himself, prostrate by the inspiration that strikes him. 

Inspired genius

When Bourdelle put his graphic skills at the service of his sculpture, he often endeavoured to highlight the work he had already produced. Circling around a sculpture, like a visitor, he seemed to want to judge the structural effect of a hollow, to give the base its rightful place, imposing its shape and proportions, as a ‘sculptor-architect’, as he liked to call himself.

Staging sculpture

Often confused with his death mask, which recorded the emaciated face of the dying man, this ‘live’ mask was created by the sculptor Franz Klein. To complete his bust of Beethoven, Klein was authorised to take a plaster cast of the composer's face, which required that his eyes and mouth be protected and that he breathe through tubes inserted into his nose.

Under Beethoven's eye

In his home town of Montauban, the very young Bourdelle noticed a portrait of Beethoven in a bookseller's shop, with whom he shared a high forehead, fiery eyes and feisty hairstyle. The physical identification soon became artistic. 

Specular double

Through photography, which played a decisive role in his artistic practice, Bourdelle both documented and revisited his work. While some of the shots are simply monstrations, recording what is visible, others depict Beethoven using scenographic tricks - a singular base, a clever drapery, a neutral background in the middle of the studio. 

Mises en abyme

Around 1903, shortly after the French state purchased one of his busts of Beethoven, Bourdelle recorded his anticipated recognition in a notebook, along with his questions and doubts about creation. 

An eloquent notebook

Demonstrating an incessant desire to collect, cut and classify, Bourdelle preserved in his archives and library the iconographic and intellectual sources of his obsession. 

A methodical compilation

After the sculptor's death, in 1929, the critical fortunes of the Beethovenian theme in Antoine Bourdelle's work were the subject of numerous articles and publications by Guy Chastel, Émile Schaub-Koch, Michel Dufet and Dorothea Kaiser. 

The fortune of a theme