Paris museum devoted to the pioneering work of French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle reopens after two-year restoration

The Musée Bourdelle in Paris, devoted to the little-known work of the French sculptor Antoine Bourdelle, reopened on March 15 after closing final August for the completion of a two-year, €5m restoration programme and a makeover of its everlasting assortment. 

To mark the reopening, the museum is internet hosting a brief exhibition of labor by the French modern artist Philippe Cognée, operating till July 16.

Greater than 40 years after his demise in 1929, Bourdelle gained a global status as a pioneer of Twentieth-century monumental sculpture. An assistant, collaborator and pal of Auguste Rodin, Bourdelle was additionally a friend-turned-rival of Aristide Maillol and a trainer of a era of youthful artists together with Alberto Giacometti, Germaine Richier and Hans Arp.

Inaugurated in 1949, the museum is centred on the sculptor’s Montparnasse studio and residential, Nineteenth-century artists’ workshops and courtyard gardens, which have been bequeathed to the Metropolis of Paris by his widow Cléopatre. 

In 1961 an exhibition corridor was added to show plasters of Bourdelle’s best-known monumental works. An additional extension, a minimalist-style wing designed by the Pritzker prize-winning architect Christian de Portzamparc, was accomplished in 1992. The newest makeover has added a restaurant transformed from an condo previously occupied by Bourdelle’s daughter Rhodia and her artwork deco designer husband Michel Dufet.

The studio, product of timber and in-built 1878 on the location of an deserted limestone mine, was structurally fragile, missing foundations and affected by rising damp. A survey by the Paris inspectorate of quarries discovered the bottom beneath the constructing was riddled with a community of tunnels which needed to be crammed in with cement, the museum’s director Ophélie Ferlier-Bouat tells The Artwork Newspaper. “I do not know precisely what number of tons of cement, nevertheless it was an terrible lot,” she says.

The timber body, initially meant as a brief construction, has been strengthened by the insertion of a reinforcing metal cage. This has additionally allowed the restaurant area to be opened on the ground above. The excessive north-facing home windows have been changed to extend the quantity of sunshine within the area. Parquet wooden flooring, badly broken by damp, have been restored, and the partitions and roofs have been damp-proofed and insulated.

The seven-month closure has additionally allowed a whole remodeling of the everlasting exhibition areas by the architects Dominique Brard and Sandra Courtine, specialists in museum design and scenography. The brand new structure organises the gathering in a sequence of ground-floor rooms organized thematically and chronologically across the courtyard backyard. They embody areas targeted on Bourdelle’s 18-year fin-de-siècle collaboration with Rodin; his evolution in direction of symbolism and Expressionism; his sculpted friezes and reliefs (1910-13) for the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris, for which the dancer Isadora Duncan posed as his mannequin; and his relationship within the Nineteen Twenties with youthful Modernist artists equivalent to Arp, Richier and Giacometti. 

“The philosophy of the museum was monographic, it was all about Bourdelle,” says Ferlier-Bouat. “Now the thought is to reinscribe him right into a context, which is the historical past of sculpture.”

To assist this, the everlasting show has been expanded with 35 extra sculptures on present, together with loans from the Giacometti Basis, the Paris Museum of Fashionable Artwork and the heirs of Germaine Richier.

The selection of the sculptor and painter Philippe Cognée for the opening present displays this new focus. The core of the present, within the museum’s Portzamparc wing, is a monumental work, titled Le Catalogue de Bâle (2013-15). It consists of greater than 1,000 pages of pictures ripped at random from a decade of catalogues of the Artwork Basel honest and overpainted with Cognée’s signature scorching wax.

Ferlier-Bouat, who got here from the Louvre sculpture division to run the museum in September 2021, credit the thought for the present to her predecessor Amélie Simier, now the director of the Musée Rodin. She says she plans to proceed in the identical vein, with a present subsequent yr placing Bourdelle in dialogue with Rodin, and, in 2025, placing a highlight on the inventive and workshop axis between the worlds of sculpture and vogue.