Antoine Bourdelle

Antoine Bourdelle on his death-bed.

Dying Centaur, beardless version (Centaure Mourant), 1914 (bronze with green patina), National Gallery (Athens)

Hercules the Archer by Antoine Bourdelle, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Antoine Bourdelle (October 30, 1861, Montauban – October 1, 1929), originally Émile Antoine Bourdelle, was an influential and prolific French sculptor, painter, and teacher.

Career

Bourdelle was born at Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne. He left school at the age of 13 to work as a wood carver in his father's cabinet making shop. He learned drawing with the founder of the Ingres Museum in Montauban, then sculpture at the art school in Toulouse. At the age of 24 he won a scholarship to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, worked briefly in the atelier of Alexandre Falguière, then several years with Jules Dalou.

In 1888 he did his first sculptures of Beethoven, producing authoritative work with an emphasis on order, the spirit of geometry, construction and invention. He became one of the pioneers of 20th century monumental sculpture. Auguste Rodin became a great admirer of his work, and by September 1893 Antoine Bourdelle joined Rodin as his assistant where he soon became a popular teacher, both there and at his own studio where many future prominent artists attended his classes, so that his influence on sculpture was considerable.

During his last years, Bourdelle received several commissions for monuments and war memorials. He was a participant in the 1913 Armory Show in New York, a founder and vice-president of the Parisian Salon des Tuileries, and in 1924 became a commander of the Legion of Honor. Bourdelle's only son and student, Pierre Bourdelle (1901-1966), became an artist most active in the United States, most notably in the 1933 Cincinnati Union Terminal.

Bourdelle died at Le Vésinet, near Paris, on October 1, 1929 and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris, France.

Work

Bourdelle's major work includes:

• spandrel reliefs for the portal of the Musée Grévin, Paris, 1900
• the Monument aux Morts de Montauban, 1902
• the freestanding gilded bronze Hercules the Archer, 1909
• the decorative series of friezes executed for the exterior of Auguste Perret's Théâtre des Champs-Élysées (1913). Although the building itself is famously an early example of concrete construction, the friezes are marble.
• interior frieze at the Opéra de Marseille, framing the stage
• the Monument to Mickiewicz near the Pont de l'Alma in Paris, designed in 1909, realized in 1929
• two angels on the crypt at the war memorial, Hartmannswillerkopf, for French architect Robert Danis, 1920s
• bronze tympanum Pieta for the Église Notre-Dame du Raincy, designed in the 1920s, finally realized and dedicated in September 1999
• equestrian statue of General Carlos María de Alvear, Recoleta, Buenos Aires
• war memorial, Capoulet-et-Junac

Today the Musée Bourdelle in Paris sits amidst brick houses at 18 rue Antoine Bourdelle, a small street between the Gare Montparnasse and the offices of the famous French newspaper Le Monde. The museum consists of Bourdelle's house, studio and garden where he worked from 1884 to 1929. A second Bourdelle garden-museum, in Égreville, was established by his heirs in the late 1960s hosts another 56 of his sculptures.

His work is also exhibited in public collections worldwide, including the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art (Japan), the Cleveland Museum of Art, National Museum of Art of Romania, the Courtauld Institute of Art (London), the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna (Rome), Harvard University Art Museums, the Hermitage Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (Washington D.C.), the Honolulu Academy of Arts, the Kimbell Art Museum (Fort Worth, Texas), Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo, Netherlands), the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Buenos Aires), the National Galleries of Scotland, the National Gallery of Australia, the Ingres museum in Montauban, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, and the Middelheim Museum (Antwerp, Belgium)

The teacher

Artists who studied with Antoine Bourdelle included:

• Thanassis Apartis, Greece
• Alfredo Bigatti, Argentina
• Jose Luis Zorrilla de San Martin, Uruguay
• Samuel Cashwan, United States
• Pablo Curatella Manes, Argentina
• Béni Ferenczy, Hungary
• Alberto Giacometti, Switzerland
• Angela Gregory, United States
• Otto Gutfreund, Czechoslovakia
• Bror Hjorth, Sweden
• René Iché, France
• Raoul Josset, France/United States
• David Karfunkle, Austria/United States
• Emile Lahner, Hungary
• Aristide Maillol, France
• Vadym Meller, Russian Empire
• Vera Mukhina, Russian Empire/USSR
• Bencho Obreshkov, Bulgaria
• Dudley Pratt, United States
• Virginia Claflin Pratt, United States
• Germaine Richier, France
• Arnold Ronnebeck, Germany/United States
• Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Portugal
• Risto Stijovic, Serbia
• Mihailo Tomic, Serbia
• Sreten Stojanovic, Serbia
• Josefina de Vasconcellos, England
• Helen Wilson, United States
• Teodors Zalkalns, Latvia
• Ryumon Yasuda, Japan

For a first hand account of Bourdelle's teaching style see Arnold Ronnebeck's article from 1925, published in The Arts 8, no. 4 titled "Bourdelle Speaks to His Pupils: From a Paris Diary."

Gallery

• 

  'La Grande Penelope', bronze sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle, 1912, Honolulu Academy of Arts

• 

  Antoine Bourdelle's ‘La Libert'e’ in front of Daido Life Insurance Company headquarters in Osaka, Osaka prefecture, Japan

• 

  Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, The sculptress at work, 1906, bronze, Stanford Museum, Stanford University, California

• 

  The Virgin Of Alsace, 1919-21, Edinburgh Scotland

• 

  Dominique Ingres by Antoine Bourdelle

• 

  ’Le Jour et la Nuit’, marble sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle, 1903

• 

  Gilt bronze portrait of Gustave Eiffel by Antoine Bourdelle beneath the Eiffel Tower

• 

  Monument to General Carlos M. de Alvear by Antoine Bourdelle, Plaza Francia, Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina

• 

  Bronze portrait of the art critic Mécislas Goldberg by Antoine Bourdelle

References

• Colin Lemoine, Antoine Bourdelle. L'oeuvre à demeure, Paris, Paris-Musées, 2009
• Bourdelle, Émile-Antoine, “Émile-Antoine Bourdelle, Sculptures and Drawings”, Perth, Western Australian Art Gallery, 1978.
• Ottawa.National Gallery of Canada, “Antoine Bourdelle, 1861-1929”, New York, C. E. Slatkin Galleries, 1961.
• Colin Lemoine, “Bourdelle”, Paris, Cercle d'art, 2004
• “Antoine Bourdelle, passeur de la modernité", exhibition catalogue (curators Roxana Theodorescu, Juliette Laffon and Colin Lemoine / Catalogue Colin Lemoine), Bucarest, National Museum of Art , 2006
• Colin Lemoine, “Le Fruit : une œuvre majuscule d’Antoine Bourdelle”, Ligeia, January–June 2005, n°57-58-59-60, p. 60-78
• Colin Lemoine, “...sans ce modelé à la Rodin, à la XVIIIe siècle qui beurre le tout : Bourdelle et la question d'un primitivisme occidental”, Bulletin du musée Ingres, May 2006, n° 78, p. 49-66
• Cléopâtre Sevastos, “Ma vie avec Bourdelle”, Paris-Musées-Editions des Cendres, 2005 (annoted edition by Colin Lemoine)
• Véronique Gautherin, “L'Oeil et la main” (2000)
• “Antoine Bourdelle, d'un siècle l'autre. L'eurythmie de la modernité”, exhibition catalogue by Colin Lemoine, Japan (Kitakyushu, Niigata, Takamatsu, Iwaki, Nagoya, Seoul), 2007-2008.

External links

• Musée Bourdelle (in French)
• Portrait of Rodin from Antoine Bourdelle, on the official website of the Musée Rodin.