Modern French Sculptors

PAUL MORAND

The Nineteenth Century was a catastrophic period for sculpture. During the years which witnessed the degeneration of many branches of the arts, (notably architecture) France alone gave birth to sculptors of imagination and originality.

The English studios were only able to produce a scattering of insignificant sculptors, and Germany, since the Reformation, had limited itself to an unimportant and inglorious role in this art. Almost the last to abandon the struggle, Spain eventually expired in the throes of the Chirrugueresque style. And even Italy, after producing innumerable legions of masterpieces, was ultimately corrupted by the formal elegances of Canova's style. He was the feeble exponent of a cold and mechanical school, a veritable art factory for the "Campo Santo," which had long since accomplished nothing worth mentioning. Only in France the fountains of inspiration and expression did not run dry. While clumsy imitators, and second-rate clay modellers were vying to outdo one another in mediocrity and banality, in this corner of Europe some strange, prolific source fed the inspiration of a group of sturdy and original artists.

Throughout this century, France made progress. Rude, the author of the most spirited of the bas-reliefs on the Arc de Triomphe was a veritable Titan. The beautiful modelling (at least in many of his medallions) showed a new gusto and vehemence. France also produced David d'Angers, the sculptor of the Romanticists; Barye, the greatest modeller of animals since the Renaissance; Carpeaux (a pupil of Rude) whose work was an extraordinary blend of grace and strength; and, finally, (but less important than these other masters) Dalou, certain of whose busts and statuettes (that of Eugene Delacroix, for example) more than his monumental conceptions, vibrate with passionate life.

There was no doubt that an age of mediocrity had arrived, in which pathos supplanted grandeur and facility replaced craftmanship and the study of form. Studio recipes were used to conceal a widespread poverty of taste and a woeful lack of originality. Was France about to suffer in turn the disgrace of an artistic collapse which until then it had been spared? Fremiet only succeeded in making the Paris squares and salons ugly; as for Bartholdi, the Alsatian, he sought safety in flight ... to America.

At the end of the Nineteenth Century Rodin appeared, to save an art on the point of expiring. His intervention literally put new blood into anaemic bodies. This determined, thankless, and bitter labour was undertaken without respite, in isolation, by a man who was encouraged by none. He began by having his work refused three times in succession by exhibitions of the tlcole des Beaux Arts. In spite of everything he overcame each obstacle, and won a difficult, seemingly hopeless battle. Twenty years afterwards the false gods crumbled into dust. And Rodin who, like Pasteur, had long been treated as an imposter—Rodin, the revolutionary "who did not know how to draw" became in the eyes of the world, the representative of true classical art.

When the master of Meudon died in 1917, he left no artistic posterity, unless one excepts Mile. Claudel, sister of the French Ambassador to America, who was early deviated from her artistic career through tragic circumstances. In reality Rodin, who breathed new life into sculpture and led it from the beaten track of worn-out convention, was not a fore-runner, but the last representative of a particular mood. Of all who have followed him not one claims or cares to claim himself as Rodin's successor.

Rodin made the entire latter-day movement possible. But while he is still its inspiration, he is no longer its guide. The flowering of an unique genius, Rodin's art is an analytical one which unites the most diverse tendencies of Romanticism and Naturalism. Full of impetuous inexactitudes, unrelated, exaggerated, formless, Rodin's work is merely a series of magnificent fragments. Each one is separately and independently alive, but nevertheless it remains purely fragmentary. This is chiefly perceptible in Rodin's great compositions such as Porte de I'Enfer the uncompleted Tour, the Travail. These conceptions, gigantic and moving though they are, are totally unrelated in spirit.

Bourdelle, on the contrary, brings us to the beginning of a synthetic art which deliberately breaks with Rodin's sensitive realism. Rodin's nudes, merged in passionate movement, remained nevertheless isolated figures, while in Bourdelle's work the freest gestures and the most distorted figures remain within the framework of the general composition. The inter-relationship of planes is conditioned in Bourdelle's conception by the intention of the monument itself, resulting in a complete and harmonious architecture. A particular form while remaining free is nevertheless so constructed in relation to the mass that it does not detach itself from it, or break itself up into disordered lyricism. Bourdelle constructs where Rodin suggests. The logic of sculptural form meant more to him than Rodin's exclusive preoccupation with light which the latter too often practised to the detriment of his volumes. Nevertheless Bourdelle's art is related in certain aspects to Rodin's by its literary implications. This explains, perhaps, why Bourdelle, exalted and profoundly admired as he was by all his imitators and disciples has not found any one to echo his teachings. Therefore it may be claimed that his influence on contemporary sculpture has been negligible.

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However, the direction and the import of his researches, the inclination of his taste toward a Roman style and later toward the archaic Greek, Egyptian and Assyrian, joins him to the young generation whose archaic tendencies are well known.

The dominating characteristic of contemporary French sculpture is the study of pure volumes, of the static, of geometrical solids, of bodies in repose. Modern sculpture is passionately preoccupied with the complete mastery of material. Artisans first, the sculptors of to-day, following the traditions of ancient artisans, are their own workmen. They cut the stone themselves, carve the wood, toil like workers. This discipline imposes an excellent restraint in form upon the sculptor.

The temperament of Joseph Bernard, less rich than Bourdelle's, possesses a strange beauty whose sensuality is never basely carnal. He occupies at the present moment a predominant place among those who began work in the first years of the twentieth century.

His female statues, his wild bacchantes, exert a singular fascination. They have a tranquillity, an expressive simplicity, a linear purity that one might almost term biblical. He is preeminently a sculptor of women. Lajeune Fille a la Draperie, La Serenite, rank among the most beauti f ul female images.

Rodin discovered Despiau in 1903 and was struck by the vitality and rare sensibility which the latter displayed. Since then that sensibility has been constantly enriched. The artist's vision has gained in variety and acuity without losing any of its freshness and its exquisite simplicity. His style is forthright in its simple beauty, resorting to no facile effects, free of all adventitious or accidental ornament, expressing only the essential elements of poetry. One can in all justice speak of Despiau in the same breath with Houdon and Donatello.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to designate the followers of Rodin or Bourdelle, but it is easy to estimate the profound effect which Despiau has had on the most talented of contemporary sculptors. It is not an extravagant assertion that the greater part of the young sculptors of today draw their inspiration from him, beginning with his compatriot Wlerik, who has an enchanting freshness and a superb range of intellect. What is apparent in Wlerik is no less true of the others. There is Gimond, a precise craftsman, Cornet, with his patrician reserve, the sympathetic Cavaillon, the simple, moving art of Mile. Jane Poupelet, and the well constructed effigies of Arnold.

Possessing as wide a variety of temperament as one could wish, nevertheless, a great number of the eminent artists of our epoch display a certain unity in their style. This is a very important fact to note. They distrust "the dangerous suppleness of clay" which might tend to weaken their art. Therefore for the most part, they work freely in wood and in stone. Whether they are modellers of animals, like Guyot, Poupelet, Hernandez, Pavie, or Pompon, stone cutters like Nivet, Niclausse or Drivier, or wood-sculptors like Guenot, theirs is a common problem: volumes, economy of detail, and concise and logical construction. They all desire (the sculptors more than the modellers) to restore to sculpture its original role by cultivating those qualities which, in all times—in ancient Egypt, in archaic Greece, and the Far East—have been the purest qualities of statuary. Certain artists, such as Jane Poupelet, have unconsciously applied this instinctive knowledge of the primitive law of frontality to their own work. They have realized that techniques must differ according to the materials employed. Nowadays, marble and bronze are no longer handled as they were in decadent periods of art.

If modern sculpture must be judged by comparison with Charles Despiau it must likewise be judged with reference to Aristide Maillol.

In the case of Maillol, we see sculpture in open rebellion against the principles of Rodin. Material is treated with a conciseness, an economy that is rigorously mathematical, striving constantly toward a simplification of form. In all his works, Maillol tends towards the use of such forms as most resemble the sphere and the cylinder.

It has been justly remarked that Maillol is to sculpture what Cezanne was to painting.

In its ultimate expression, the theory of pure plastic results in an ideogrammatic formula. Cubism and negro art are confused and blended, cubes and cylinders fitted into each other and counterbalanced by an elementary logic. Volumes exist in a pure state which is sufficient to itself. Sculpture becomes an allusive and speculative game removed from all reality and life.

The Martel brothers, Archipenko, and greatest of all, Brancusi, furnish us with the most significant examples of this tendency. This is an effort like Cubism, definitely dedicated to the principle of restraint, for which the painters are really more responsible than the sculptors. The impetus of Picasso and Braque contributed greatly to directing sculpture into this path. Such artists as Lipschitz, Zadkin or Chana Orloff do not go quite as far, but the parallelism of their lines, their somewhat dry and abstract stylizations seem excessive to us. This schematicism tends to create nothing but a new form of stereotyped art, an art which reverts to prehistoric principles.

Manolo, Laurens, and Salengre, have better understood the teachings of Maillol. They have resisted the temptation to solve plastic problems by the easy application of a formula.

What must be remembered in conclusion is that the essential character of these artists, the bond which unites their labours, is the desire to return to a style, to restore the qualities of composition and balance to an honourable place, and thus to recapture the great traditions of sculpture.

Baudelaire wrote an article entitled: "Why sculpture is boring." It is true that the sculpture of 1846, which was simply clay braced by a wire armature, had lost the secret of nature. It seemed like the cry of a lost soul in the empty halls of the official Salons.

Today our modern sculptors have returned to the divine.