From a Memory of Songs

Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, who was born 100 years ago in the French town of Montauban, said all his life that his talent came from four sources, all in the family. His father, a furniture maker, gave him his sense of architecture. His uncle, a stonecutter, taught him the secrets of stone. His maternal grandfather, a weaver, gave him his sense of color, and his other grandfather, a shepherd, taught him his love of nature.

How this heritage worked out is something art lovers all over the U.S. are now seeing for themselves. A small retrospective opened at Manhattan's Slatkin Galleries last November, after a month in Ottawa. It went on to Toledo, last week opened with 89 items at the St. Louis City Art Museum, and will go later to Santa Barbara, San Diego, San Francisco and Cincinnati.

Carvings in Chalk. At school, young Bourdelle paid no attention to his studies. At the end of each day, his pockets would be crammed with tiny sculptures he had carved from chalk and wood. When he was 13, he produced a delicate fawn for one of his father's customers, and it so pleased a local patron that Bourdelle was sent to nearby Toulouse to study art.

There he became so absorbed in his work that some of his schoolmates were under the impression that he was a mute. Bourdelle went on to the tradition-bound Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris (which he quit in disgust after six months), finally landed in the studio of Rodin. The great man admired his young assistant from the start, but in spite of his affection for the master, Bourdelle never considered himself a Rodin disciple.

Any Mood He Chose. Rodin was essentially a modeler; Bourdelle constructed his figures as if they were architecture. His inspiration came from many times and many places--from the early Greeks, the Assyrians, from medieval church sculpture, from "all my memory of the songs of the masters, of innumerable architectures." But Bourdelle's main concern was to build up his forms in such a way that they not only displayed exactly the right tension with each other but also possessed lives of their own. Whether turning out monuments or figures a few inches high, he could produce any mood he chose. In his 21 studies of Beethoven, he distorted and exaggerated to reveal violence, sadness or ecstasy. In his Madame Roussel with Hat, the mood is elegantly casual, and few sculptures possess such an air of sweet repose as his Sculptress Resting, which is also a portrait of his wife.

Madame Bourdelle, now 79, still devotes her life to her husband, who died 32 years ago. She recalls how he would get up at 4 in the morning to plunge into his work, how he would almost never accompany his friends to the cafes ("I get drunk another way," he would say), and how she would not let him out of the house with more than 20 francs in his pocket because he was forever giving money away to the poor. "He made himself a great man." Madame Bourdelle says, "The man was at least as great as his works, and there is no greater compliment."

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