Plunging visitors into the heart of creative processes, bringing out the faces of those who populated Montparnasse’s workshops, the exhibition highlights the complex relationships between master and student, between artist and practitioner, through the figure of the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle. Their trajectories, fidelity to the master’s teaching or violent rejection, will be shown in the exhibition through 165 works, including some fifty photographs, fifty or so sculptures and about forty drawings. Halfway thru and specifically created for the exhibition, a visual, sound and tactile module.
“I am not a schoolmaster, a teacher, but an artist who works with you.”
Antoine Bourdelle is a major figure teaching art in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century. Professor, teacher, mentor and sometimes surrogate father, he sees himself as a comrade among the aspiring artists who surround him. His charismatic and benevolent personality will attract during forty years nearly five hundred students: French, Russians, Americans, Chinese, Portuguese, Brazilians, Japanese, Polish, Greeks, Swiss, Romanians, Swedes, Czechs … Many of them returning to their native country became in turn renowned teachers, thus extending the lessons of Bourdelle. Some of these students became famous like Alberto Giacometti or Germaine Richier; others have been forgotten or have not made a career: the exhibition brings to life the faces of these artists from all over the world who came to the source of knowledge.
Transmission / Transgression
From October 3rd to February 3rd, 2019
Musée Bourdelle
18, rue Antoine Bourdelle
75015 Paris
