The following is an incomplete list of artworks by the French artist Antoine Bourdelle.
Antoine Bourdelle (31 October 1861 – 1 October 1929), born Émile Antoine Bordelles,Birth certificate of Émile Antoine Bordelles, Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication, Leonore was an influential and prolific French sculptor, painter, and teacher. His studio became the Musée Bourdelle, an art museum dedicated to his work, located at 18, rue Antoine Bourdelle, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, France.
In 1905, he mounted an exhibition of his work at the Galerie Hébrard in Paris, showing 38 sculptures, 18 paintings and 21 drawings. The sculptures included La Nonne from 1888 as well as the Head of Apollo and his Great Tragic Mask of Beethoven. Bourdelle's father died in 1906 and in 1909 he left Rodin's studio. The year 1910, saw his Héraklès tue les oiseaux du lac Stymphale of 1909 shown at the Salon and this was a huge success! A version of this work is held in the Musée d'Orsay. Whilst working as a sculptor he also taught at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Montparnasse, his pupils including Alberto Giacometti, Aristide Maillol, René Iché and Germaine Richier. 1910 also saw his divorce from Stéphanie Van Parys and in 1911 Rhodia Bourdelle was born to him and Cléopâtre Sévastos. In 1913 an exhibition of modern art in New York included his Héraklès and Tête d’Apollon, the commission for the monument to Genéral Alvéar in Argentina was formalized and he carried out the sculptures for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées. He founded and was vice president of the Salon des Tuileries.Emile Antoine Bourdelle by Peter Cannon-Brookes. Trefoil Books Ltd. .
Many works by Bourdelle can be seen in the Musée Bourdelle- Buste de Beethoven, Adam, Le bélier rétif, Centaure mourant, La Liberté and Vierge à l'enfant. From 1922 to 1923 he worked on La Vierge à l’offrande and completed the maquette for La France. He also completed La Naissance d’Aphrodite for the Marseille Opera House. In 1925 he exhibited at the Exposition internationale des Arts décoratifs showing Sappho, Le Livre and Masque de Bourdelle in the Pavillon du livre. 1926 finally saw his Alvéar monument inaugurated after 10 years of work and a version of La France was exhibited at the Salon des Tuileries. 1928 saw a retrospective exhibition to celebrate the inauguration of the Brussels Palais des Beaux-Arts and 1929, the year of his death, saw the Monument to Adam Mickiewicz inaugurated. Bourdelle died on the 1 October 1929 at Vésinet whilst a guest of the founder Rudier. In 1931 there was a great retrospective of Bourdelle's work at the Paris Orangerie. He is buried in Montparnasse cemetery. In 1924 he had been made Commandeur de l'Ordre de la Légion d'honneur.
War memorials Name Location Date NotesMonument aux Combattants et Défenseurs du Tarn-et-Garonne de 1870–71Montauban1893 to 1902This monument dedicated to those men of the Tarn-et-Garonne region who gave their lives in the Franco-Prussian war was Bourdelle's first major commission. It had long been the practice in France to award commissions to local born artists but given his inexperience Bourdelle was fortunate to be approached as early as 1893 and finally chosen in 1897 for what was a most prestigious work. A maquette was submitted to the adjudicating committee and Bourdelle set about the commission, creating many plaster studies along the way as was his practice. He executed some 49 studies for the four heads involved, 34 in full size and submitted some to the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts- Dragon sur Rocher in 1897 and Figures Hurlantes in 1899. Many of the plaster casts involved were lost when on their return from a Belgian foundry, who had made several bronze casts, they were badly damaged; the foundry had sent them back by railway without adequate packaging/protection! Only the Grand Guerrier de Montauban could be restored. The complete monument was shown at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1902 and finally erected in that year. The composition moved away from that traditionally used for such memorials. Louis Gillet the art critic described the work as a "tumultuous mass" which seems wholly appropriate but many critics were scathing in their comments. One critic described the work as Bourdelle had moved away from the banality of the usual war memorial compositions with wounded soldiers in heroic poses and people with flags, etc., etc. and vividly shows the horror of war Toulouse War Memorial (monument aux morts) Toulouse1909This memorial stands in the Place Héracles in Toulouse and is known as the Monument aux Sports. It uses Bourdelle's 1909 Hercules the Archer (Héraklès tue les oiseaux du lac Stymphale) as its centre-piece and was erected in memory of all those sportsmen who died in the 1914–18 war, including the Toulouse rugby player Alfred Mayssonnié.Chemin de mémoire : Thèse sur P. Voivenel par Cécile Lestrade Interne des Hôpitaux La France Briançon1920–23The bronze statue in Briançon is one of several castings of the Bourdelle work La France. It was after the 1914–18 war that a project was launched to create a sculpture to commemorate the 1917 entry of the United States of America into that war and the architects Ventre et Damour were asked to design it. The first thoughts were to erect the monument at the Pointe de Grave near where the Americans had disembarked in 1917 and the architects had the idea of constructing a lighthouse in front of which would be placed a colossal statue depicting France searching the horizon for a sight of the Americans. At first the commission to create the statue was given to Albert Bartholomé but he persuaded his colleague Bourdelle to accept it and Bourdelle had the first maquette ready in 1922. Meanwhile, the building of the lighthouse had gone ahead but consumed the major part of the funds allocated for the project, leaving little to fund Bourdelle moving to the next point. Bourdelle however managed to complete a version of the work but with a height of 4.5m, half the full size planned, which was shown at the 1923 Salon. The French State then asked Bourdelle to execute the statue in the full 9 metres height which was then cast in bronze and used to decorate the entrance to the Grand Palais at the 1925 Éxposition des Arts Décoratifs. Bourdelle based the central figure on Athena and she carries a lance and shield and wears a helmet. After the exhibition closed the sculpture was put into storage with the intention of using it at some future date as part of the project to build a Palais des Arts Décoratifs Modernes but whilst languishing in storage it was seen by Maurice Petsche, the Under Secretary of State for the Arts and the Parliamentary Deputy for Briançon, who acquired it for his town's war memorial where it was erected on a spot overlooking the Durance valley near Vauban's great fortress above the town. Another cast was made for the Montauban monument aux morts. The statue commemorating the entry of the Americans into the war was never erected by the lighthouse built in the Pointe de Grave and the lighthouse was in fact blown up by the Germans during the 1940s occupation. However, another bronze casting, 9 meter high, was made by Rudier, and this graced the terrace of Algier's Musée des Beaux-arts but in 1961 and just before Algerian independence, the monument, a symbol of France and Gaullism, was dynamited by the OAS. The fragments of Bourdelle's work were returned to France and the work was reassembled and can be seen in the Coëtquidan"Musée du Souvenir" at the École St-Cyr although the group of serpents which stood next to the figure of France in Bourdelle's original composition and part of the lance carried by the figure were lost. A fourth casting was carried out by the Hohwiller foundry and this was erected outside the Palais de Tokyo as part of a monument honouring the "Free French" and the "call" of 18 June 1940 by de Gaulle. See later entry. Bourdelle himself believed "La France" to be his greatest masterpiece. Casts of the 4.60m version are held by the Brooklyn Museum and others.Montceau-les-Mines War memorial (monument aux morts)Montceau-les-Mines1924 to 1928It was on the 17 November 1918, only days after the war had ended, that Montceau-les-Mines decided to erect a memorial to those 690 sons of Montceau-les-Mines who had lost their lives in the 1914–18 conflict. A competition was organized and the award decisions made. However, it was only many years later that the monument was erected for although the commission went to Bourdelle he did not like the designs proposed by the adjudicating committee and had his own ideas on the form the monument would take. Above all he wanted the monument to stress that the men honoured were from the mining industry. He began his work in 1919 and actually visited the mines to make studies. When the monument was completed in 1930 the sculptor had