Rodin / Bourdelle
Body to Body
Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) admired Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), twenty years his senior. He worked for fifteen years as a practitioner, responsible for carving marbles for Rodin. The master saw in this heir, willingly unruly, a “scout of the future”. Through more than 160 works, including 96 sculptures, 38 drawings, 3 paintings and 26 photographs, the confrontation reveals, with an unprecedented ambition and scope, the fraternities and reciprocities as well as the divergences and antagonisms of two creators, of two plastic universes, bearers of the major challenges of modernity.
Nephew of a stonemason and son of a cabinetmaker, Antoine Bourdelle learned how to work with the material at a very early age. Auguste Rodin became acquainted with his younger brother’s work at the Salon of the National Society of Fine Arts in 1892. Besieged with orders, Rodin then employed around ten practitioners, and solicited Bourdelle.
Between 1893 and 1907, Bourdelle carved around ten marbles for Rodin in his studios (now the Bourdelle Museum), assisted by his own practitioners and students. Eager to be more than just an executor, he offered to assist him with the founders. For his part, Rodin supported the young sculptor, particularly for the Monument aux combattant de Montauban, marked by Rodinian expressiveness. In 1902, the first tensions appeared: Bourdelle took too long to carve Eve and proposed a composition for the bust of Rose Beuret that Rodin rejected. However, their collaboration lasted a few more years. In March 1908, Bourdelle was finally able to write: “I have a lot of work at the moment. I no longer need to work for Rodin. I sell a lot.”
