Full rate : 5 €
Reduced rate : 3,50 €
Under 26 rate : 2,50 €
The springtime exhibition highlights Bourdelle’s “dark work” through a selection of early drawings, produced when the young artist’s anxiety in the grip of the “evil of the century” clashed with the certainty of the genius that carried him forward.
A creator who lacked recognition, Bourdelle spent the 1880s in a “dark period”. Tragedies and private disappointments, anxieties linked to artistic and literary ambitions nourished a melancholic and spectacular graphic production, marked by nightmarish visions and poems with Baudelarian accents.
Wounds are fundamental: this “dark work”, born from deep tensions, reveals the extreme richness of a period of teeming inquiry, a form of creative urgency between drawing and writing. Bourdelle’s graphic work ventures on the path of symbolism, naturalism and is tinged with expressionist notes. A crucial period during which Bourdelle exorcised and sublimated his anxieties in the figure of Beethoven: the portraits of the genius multiply as incarnations and doubles of the artist.
Curator Amélie Simier, head curator, head of the Bourdelle and Zadkine museums
Scientific curators Stéphane Ferrand, director of documentary studies at the Bourdelle Museum, in charge of the museum's graphic art cabinet Conservation-documentation team : Annie Barbera, Stéphanie Cantarutti, Jérôme Godeau, Colin Lemoine, Marie-Claude Pouvesle
