BOURDELLE BEFORE BEETHOVEN

The visitor will be immersed in two different atmospheres: one, clear and luminous, will confront him/her with the multiple sculpted faces of Beethoven, conceived by Bourdelle as so many variations around a cursed face, of a sovereign interiority; the other, dark and dramatic, will attempt to expose the modalities and the sources of this incorporation, but also to make dialogue sculptures, photographs and drawings in order to penetrate the secrets and subtleties of this major identification. Beethoven was for Bourdelle more than a father, a brother, a double specular, a companion on the road whose path already criss-crossed knew to show him the way, at the time of doubts and joys.

Beethoven is a complete, but also a cursed,  artist. His frenzied scores consoled and sublimated the deafness he suffered from. With him, since him, artists have scrutinised their most intimate passions and darkest nights, torments and visions, electrifying joys and metaphysical angst. This coming of age of sensibility, which foreshadows Romanticism and, soon after, Expressionism, was the object of obsession for both painters and sculptors. In other words, all those soul-searchers who, from Austria to Japan, Sweden to the United States, claimed the composer as their aesthetic forebear.
Under the auspices of Beethoven, and especially of his fascinating life mask – cast from his face when he was alive –, artists search to find their path, often turning their eye inward. When Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929) was barely 20 years old and a student in Toulouse, he discovered Beethoven’s music and quickly identified with the “soul of a master”. Moreover, the composer’s tousled hair, sombre expression and lofty aspirations were similar to his own. While the sculptor would sometimes sacrifice social niceties for a concert, he admitted to listening to Beethoven “from memory alone”, rather than “constant listening”. He preferred to approach him through reading, sketches, photographs, and most of all, the some 80 sculpted portraits that Bourdelle made of the composer from 1888 up to his death in 1929. They are like so many variations of an enchanting leitmotif.

The new display, made up of sculptures, photographs, drawings and archives, bears witness to the illustrious history of an obsession, perhaps even a sort of father-son relationship if we revisit Bourdelle’s own admission: “I in turn, with tenacious pre-meditation, picked up where he left off”.
 
CURATOR : Colin Lemoine, Responsable des sculptures

ASSOCIATED CURATORS :
Claire Boisserolles, Responsable des Archives et des bibliothèques du musée Bourdelle
Stéphane Ferrand, responsable du cabinet des arts graphiques et du fonds de photographies