Antoine Bourdelle

An outstanding French sculptor, painter, draftsman and teacher. After working for 15 years at the workshop of Auguste Rodin, first as his assistant and student, and then as his colleague, Antoine Bourdelle became an influential figure in the European art community.

Bourdelle’s Paris Studio Studio was visited by such students as Aristide Mayol, Vera Mukhina, Alberto Giacometti, who became outstanding sculptors, as well as artists Henri Matisse, Vadim Meller and dozens of others.

The sculptor’s outstanding talent is evidenced by a large number of orders received by him for monumental buildings of national importance and a considerable number of works performed for capitals and cities around the world.

The legacy of the master, who did not object to the repeated replication of his most outstanding works, is represented in museums around the world with his castings of bronze figures and compositions, as well as the copies of his works of later years.

The artist became the full holder of awards of the Order of the Legion of Honor of France, was the founder and vice president of the Tuileries Salon in Paris. He created portraits of such prominent people as O. Rodin, G. Efel, and others.

The house with his workshop in Paris, in which the sculptor lived and worked from 1884 until the end of his life, became an art museum, where there are many ready-made works, as well as sketches for them, made in terracotta, clay and plaster. The garden adjoins the museum, which also became the place to exhibit sculptures by Antoine Bourdelle. The second garden-museum of the sculptor was opened in Égreville thanks to the efforts of the heirs; 56 works by the master are presented there.

Key ideas:

– By the time Antoine Bourdelle became a sculptor, the Impressionists had proposed a radical departure from Classicism. In sculpture, this most often meant moving away from polished surfaces and classic proportions. Also, not a gesture or a pose of a character, but a deformation of a structure increasingly became a new means of expression. These trends are most strongly observed in the early works of Antoine Bourdelle.

– The sculptor shared the ideas and methods of work of his teacher Auguste Rodin, in particular, used his “theory of profiles”. According to this conviction of the master, the truth is achieved through “tight execution” – the inclusion of a number of basic features inherent in the character in one work, as well as the observance of the conditions for the obligatory mention of the main activity of the character through the details of the intended composition.

– An important and characteristic feature of the sculptor’s work was the presence of a symbolic beginning in both design and execution. Any work carried the idea of ​​the author, which remained humanistic throughout the entire career of Antoine Bourdelle.

– The style of the mature master is characterized by his attempts to combine the more modern language of plastic art with the traditions of the great classic sculpture. This was manifested both in the theme – antique and biblical, and in the visualization of such famous images as Sappho or Hercules.