Antoine Bourdelle was a sculptor, a pupil and then collaborator with Rodin. This museum – his studio plus modern extensions for displaying his work plus special exhibitions – provides you with plenty of opportunity to get to know his style, which is basically Rodin meets Art Deco.
The museum is OK, I guess. There’s a resident cat in the gardens, there are Bourdelle’s personal collections of “antiquities” to sharpen up your forgery-spotting skills, and the special exhibitions seem ambitious (the current one is on Isadora Duncan).
But… it’s hard for me to make an unbiased judgment, considering just how much I hate the style of Rodin and, by extension, Bourdelle.
I’m sorry – I know that’s like saying that I hate crepes and Leonardo da Vinci (or a Leonardo da Vinci made out of crepes). But Rodin and Bourdelle were uneasily negotiating between classical realism and modern abstraction, and ended up with realistic subject matter – “Look, I’m sculpting a woman!” – but made with thumbprinty, lumpy, semi-abstract surfaces – “Look, her nipple is just a big hunk of clay I stuck on there!” Ironically, I love this type of transitional style in paintings (see my ravings about Monet’s late style), but it makes me cry on the inside when it comes to sculpture. Also on the outside. Just a little. Only the cat saw…
