A major work where life and death, desire and king, sound and fury converge, Bourdelle’s Les Combattants are the subject, for the first time, of an exhibition designed as a dialogue between sculpture and photography.
Intended for Montauban, Bourdelle’s hometown, the war memorial of Tarn-et-Garonne, 1870-1871 pays tribute to the soldiers of the Franco-Prussian War. Marked by the defeat of Sedan, the monument also celebrates the hope of revenge and the birth of the Third Republic, born out of the fall of the Second Empire.
When he won the competition in 1895 for this commission of magnitude, he was thirty-three years old. Inspired by Rodin for whom he worked, he designed the sculpture as an assembly of expressive figures. Over the course of seven years researching and studying, the artist developed a personal language that signaled a turn in his career and would soon create Hercules the Archer (1906-1909) and Dying Centaur (1911-1914). But the monument was also the subject of an important body of photographic work, to which no other works by Bourdelle would ever compare.
Before being inaugurated in Montauban on September 14, 1902, the monument was exhibited in Paris the spring of that same year during the prestigious Salon de la Société National des Beaux-Arts. There, in front of the Grand Palais, the monument’s group of soldiers was visible to all, a true emblem of contemporary sculpture.
This statuary masterpiece, although it was admired and rarely cause controversy, remains largely unknown. This exhibition puts the studies and variations of the monument (earthenware, plasters, bronzes) in the spotlight, as well as an ensemble of 130 photographs. The finished monument is brought to life by Les Combattants, a commissioned video work by artist Olivier Dollinger in 2016. All these works, most previously unseen, reveal the overwhelming richness of the work of Bourdelle, a sculptor as well as a photographer.
De bruit et de fureur, Bourdelle sculpteur et photographe
(Of Sound and Fury, Sculptor and Photographer Bourdelle)
October 27, 2016 through January 29, 2017
Musée Bourdelle
18 rue Antoine-Bourdelle
75015 Paris
France
Catalogue, 35€
