Transmission - Transgression

‘I am like Socrates. I give birth to your soul’, Antoine Bourdelle used to say to his students.

Plunging visitors into the heart of the creative process, bringing to life the faces of those who populated the Montparnasse studios, the exhibition highlights the complex relationship between master and student, artist and practitioner, through the figure of the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle.

Their paths, their faithfulness to the master's teaching or their violent rejection of it, will be portrayed in the exhibition through around 165 works, including some fifty photographs, fifty sculptures and forty drawings. At the centre of the exhibition, a visual and tactile module will be dedicated to the process of carving by pointing.

‘I am not a schoolteacher or a professor, but an artist who works with you’.

Antoine Bourdelle was a major figure in art education in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. Teacher, master, mentor and sometimes surrogate father, he saw himself as a comrade to the budding artists around him. Over a period of forty years, his charismatic and benevolent personality attracted nearly five hundred students: French, Russians, Americans, Chinese, Portuguese, Brazilians, Japanese, Poles, Greeks, Swiss, Romanians, Swedes, Czechs and others. Many of them returned to their native countries to become renowned teachers, continuing Bourdelle's lessons. Some of these students became famous, like Alberto Giacometti or Germaine Richier; others were forgotten or did not make a career of it: the exhibition here brings back to life the faces of these artists who came from all over the world to the source of knowledge.

Curators
Claire Boisserolles, in charge of archives, documentation and libraries at the musée Bourdelle
Stéphane Ferrand, in charge of the graphic art cabinet and paintings at the musée Bourdelle 
Amélie Simier, head curator, head of the Bourdelle and Zadkine museums