One evident mark on his work absent from Rodin's sculptures is the great tragedy of the early twentieth century—war. War is the dark shadow behind all the Modernists of Montparnasse. But the curious thing about this war culture is that it actually pre-dated the war. Nature imitates art, argued Oscar Wilde, an habitue' of the Paris salons of the 1880s and 90s. Which came first, the imagination or the fact? In the case of First World War art, it is a pertinent question. Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism, Futurism and the other movements that we so often associate with the post-war years can already be found in Montparnasse in the years before the First World War, and particularly in Bourdelle's work. One obvious reason is that there were factors working on these movements that had nothing to do with the war-photography is the most striking example. But at a profounder level there can be found in the modern revolt against neoclassical form and its fascination with primitivism a radical aggressiveness that prefigured the war: the inhibitions of the Victorian age were dropped. Paris of the great Expositions had never shared the confidence that London had enjoyed; her industry was not as strong and she had already been crushed in one German war back in 1870. The horrors that Bourdelle's Parnassian neighbour Dalou had lived through that year had no parallel in Britain. So in Paris the modern revolt joined with anguish—a mal, as the future war leader Georges Clemenceau put it, "that gnaws at us."
In 1893, the year he started work as Rodin'spraticien, Bourdelle received a commission from his home town, Montauban, to build a memorial for the local boys who had died in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. It became an epic project: its graphic depiction of violence and death would inspire many of the war memorials that would be scattered through France after 1918; no French town square had ever seen anything like it before, which is why, when it was eventually erected in 1902, there was a tremendous scandal. The famous review Art Decoratif labelled it "Hottentot art" and criticized it for defying the laws of anatomy; for the art critic in the Petit Journal it was a large pile of bronze that seemed to have been pulled from under the ground by archaeologists, "having been bizarrely deformed within the entrails of the earth."
For the untrained eye it had the look of chaos. From no single angle could one view the whole collection of screaming heads, bent torsos and contortions of death. But nobody who passes through Montauban will ever forget it. Those serpentine human forms are worth pondering. Bourdelle had spent a decade working on the details, gradually building them up on a pivot that turned on a naked warrior whose outstretched left arm, it is true, defies the laws of anatomy—though photographs show that Bourdelle used his own left arm as a model. His screaming heads show the influence of medieval gargoyles and foreshadow the paintings of Edvard Munch.
The principle of isolating detail for study went back to the Italian Renaissance but, then, the purpose was simply to perfect the part as an element of the integral whole. Bourdelle, working with his primitive Kodak camera, sought the autonomy of the detail; he often photographed his pieces at night, using experimental lighting—a technique that had been used by Rodin in his studios at Meudon. Bourdelle has recorded the fantastic shapes produced by the camera under these conditions. Pablo Picasso practised a similar technique in the 1940s, with wartime acetylene lamps, in collaboration with the Surrealist photographer Brassai. The method could have impressive results. One series of photographs shows Bourdelle piling his screaming heads on top of each other to study their effects. The result, in the monument at Montauban, was Bourdelle's peculiar gift to Modernism; needless to say, this was not a technique that could have been applied by the neoclassicists of sixteenth-century Florence.
Bourdelle worked frequently with themes drawn from Greek antiquity because he found in them, not the static models of harmony taught at the art schools, but an architecture that could frame his wildest fantasies of action and movement. Another pre-war statue that according to his critics again defied medical laws was Heracles Archer, which was first put on exhibition in 1910: the figure's outstretched, twisted left leg is supported on a vertical rock while his right is bent under the weight of his body, which leans back almost vertically to pull an invisible string of the bow, his muscular left and right arms perfect reflections of the positioning of his two legs. Nobody could have imagined it at the time, but photographs again demonstrate that Bourdelle had been working with a living model, the athletic Commandant Doyen-Parigot, who managed, in a series of what must have been painful fifteen-minute sessions, to contort his body into that of the ancient archer. In the background one notices the stone profile of Bourdelle's naked warrior of Montauban.
Heracles Archer made Bourdelle France's most celebrated sculptor next to Rodin. The Archer was the very image of man born out of kneaded clay, simultaneously erotic and primitive. Studies made in clay show how, over the years, the sculpted figure lost all resemblance to Commandant Doyen-Parigot and increasingly came to resemble the cannibal birds Heracles was required to murder by the shores of Lake Stymphalis. One can imagine Heracles—Latin Hercules—emerging for his kill from the kind of singing primal forest that Bourdelle's Parisian contemporary, the Douanier Henri Rousseau, liked to paint. It brilliantly synthesized the spirit of art in the French capital on the eve of the First World War: form, movement, elan.
A wealthy financier named Gabriel Thomas bought the Archer at the Salon of 1910 where it was exhibited and he immediately consulted Bourdelle on a pet project he had been toying with since 1906. Thomas was the director of Paris's wax museum, the Musee Grevin on Boulevard Montmartre, and president of the Eiffel Tower Society. Like many of the wealthy men of his day, he was a man of immense culture and learning; his desire was to set up a modern theatre on the Champs-Elysees that would startle the public both in its appearance and with the productions performed within it. Thomas had a Wagnerian project in mind, one that united all the arts, one that would revolutionize perceptions. In the first decade of the twentieth century it was thought that dance, rather than opera, was the medium by which this could be achieved. "In the ballet," wrote one of Paris's leading critics, Alexandre Benois, "I would point to the elemental mixture of visual and aural impressions; in the ballet is attained the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk about which Wagner dreamed and about which every artistically gifted person dreams." When Thomas gazed upon the nimble Heracles Archer he realized he had found the man who would decorate his theatre.
For the project's realization, Thomas had set up a real estate company with Gabriel Astruc, a flamboyant Parisian impresario whose love of foreigners proved stronger than French nationalists' hatred of them. Astruc crowded Paris's pre-war stages with the ablest foreign artists in the world: Wanda Landowska and Artur Rubinstein from Poland; Enrico Caruso, Arturo Toscanini, Lina Cavalieri and Titta Ruffo from Italy; Negro spiritual singers from the United States; and most significant of them all, Serge Diaghilev's dancers from Tsarist Russia. But the question was to purchase a suitable plot on which to build the theatre. Nothing could be found on the Champs-Elysees and, in the end, land on the still rural Avenue Montaigne was acquired by the company, though the name of the theatre remained unchanged; that is why the Theatre des Champs-Elysees is, curiously, by the Place de l'Alma on the Seine and not on the Champs-Elysees.
Thomas and Astruc had financial backing from the great artistic philanthropists of the age, like William K. Vanderbilt, J. P. Morgan and John J. Astor, along with the moral as well as financial support of Otto H. Kahn of the New York Opera. For architectural ideas they leant upon the Belgian, Henry Van de Velde, who was then based in Weimar, where he was spreading his gospel of simplicity in form and decor—it was around Van de Velde that the German Werkbund and the Bauhaus movements were born. "Ornament is a crime!" said Adolf Loos. War was declared on architectural ostentation, a campaign that was aided by another critical pre-war technological development, the invention of reinforced concrete. The masters in Paris were the Brothers Perret—Auguste, Gustave and Claude—who had erected in 1903 the city's first concrete block of flats on Rue Fr
anklin, behind the Trocadero. It would be no exaggeration to say that here is to be found the origin of the matchbox functionalism that has since ruined urban landscapes around the world. Its saving feature was the thorough artistry of its origins; the Theatre des Champs-Elysees makes a very pretty matchbox—thanks largely to the work of Bourdelle.
Thomas and Van de Velde came round to his studio on Impasse du Maine on 30 November 1910 to show him the Perret plan for the theatre. Could he sketch on to the plan the figures he intended to sculpt for the theatre's facades? There was a board meeting the next day "I got to work at six o'clock in the evening," he wrote to his second wife, Cleopatre. "I made six little projects in clay, six little models. After dinner, I finished them, and then I took up my crayons and brushes. I drew the main lines with a bad crayon, using an old broken ruler. I had no square. Instead I used a square of cardboard. All the same I did all the reliefs and then a plan of the whole facade. I even managed to correct the defects. The sky was blue when I went to bed; it was morning." The board was delighted with the results. Thomas reportedly wept.
"The wall itself," Bourdelle told his students, recollecting the image of birth through matter, "should appear to stimulate the human images while at the same time maintaining its surface, its flat light as a wall." Bourdelle worked painfully in his studio on his solid marble friezes, sticking rigorously to the rectangular plans of the Brothers Perret—to the point that the figures were shaped into the square shape of the stone. It was an extraordinary achievement, given the energetic theme he had picked: "On the call of the god Apollo the muses run from all points of the horizon." The harmony between a serene but dominant Apollo in the centre of the frieze and the running muses to right and left could only be achieved by a sense of perspective imposed by differing figure sizes, Apollo being the largest. Most sculptors would have let Apollo's figure determine the layout of the rest. Bourdelle did the reverse: he concentrated on draped runners, thus drawing the eye to their movement, while Apollo and his attendants —theoretically too large for the central stone in the frieze—were turned in physically impossible contortions that were typical of Bourdelle's modern style: the architectural rule came first in his sculpture; the problem of physical reality was relegated to a distant second. The result is to create a dynamism that is missing from all neoclassical sculpture.
He worked on the same principle in the three framed reliefs above the theatre's entrance—reliefs framed by the bodies in movement: naked Tragedy stretches her arms out horizontally to a vertical sword, her head thrown back so that her long hair falls in the same vertical direction; the violinist and piper form a perfect counterpoise, the former curved over her instrument in a manner which, though anatomically impossible, gives sound to her instrument; heads are turned sideways and drapes follow the movement of the bent legs in Dance that obviously has little to do with ancient ritual, but everything to do with the violent modern performance one is expected to find inside the theatre. The figures were based on drawings Bourdelle had made of the Polish dancer Vaslav Nijinsky and the well-known American Isadora Duncan.
Bourdelle had become fascinated by Isadora Duncan's draped displays on stage. He watched the performances mesmerized—only later at night and in the early mornings would he sketch his first impressions. "But look, just look," he said to his wife one evening. "Don't you see that she is dancing Death? I see Death even in her veils which seem so like shrouds." That same evening they watched the artists depart in a black motor car that resembled, to Bourdelle's eye, a coffin. A few hours later the same car fell in the Seine, killing Isadora's two children and their governess. The play of life and death, a danse macabre, informed the entire display that Bourdelle prepared outside and inside the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, which opened just one year before the outbreak of the First World War.
The coincidence between Bourdelle's art and this great European tragedy proved to be yet more extraordinary. In its opening season of spring 1913 the theatre lived up to all the scandal that Thomas and Astruc expected of it. Lights were projected on to Bourdelle's white friezes on the opening night, 30 March, at which extracts from Berlioz's Opéra on Florence's god of sculpture, Benvenuto Cellini, and Weber's rousing piece of German romanticism, Der Freischütz, were performed. Battle lines were drawn when a 120-manned orchestra performed on 29 May Igor Stravinsky's new Rite of Spring. To piercing violins and thundering percussion Nijinsky led Diaghilev's Russian Ballet in a shocking danse macabre during which the chosen sacrificial virgin danced herself to death.
'An extraordinary, ferocious thing," said Claude Debussy of the performance. "One might call it primitive music with every modern convenience." The booing and whistling was so loud that Gertrude Stein reported: "We could hear nothing . . . one literally could not, throughout the whole performance, hear the sound of music"—which was quite something considering the demonstrable fact that she was not present. The press dismissed Nijinsky as "a sort of Attila of the dance" and Le Figaro went so far as to describe the evening as "a border incident whose gravity the government should not underestimate." Cultural historians have pointed to this performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring as the precursor to Europe's post-war culture.
Bourdelle's own involvement in the theatre did not end with his dramatic friezes. All through the summer and autumn of 1913 he was engaged in painting the glorious frescoes which decorate the first floor of the atrium. During an interlude, or even during the performance if the music is too loud, a member of the audience can come out to the quietness of the theatre's iron staircase and contemplate Bourdelle's mythological beasts. The subject of the series once again revolves around that quintessentially Parisian obsession, the Dance of Death.
According to the legend, Heracles defeated the centaurs in the Battle of Pholoe. The last centaur was condemned by Prometheus to an eternal dying because he was immortal, like the gods. But this was simply an excuse for Bourdelle to follow his own fantasy. As one follows the series of frescoes through, one sees emerging in brilliant colours— with all the distortions and contortions so characteristic of the sculptor—a tragedy of Christian proportions, just six months before the outbreak of war. Amidst a forest of trees the last centaur dies with his arms outstretched in the form of a crucifix.
Then, one month before the war, in July 1914, Bourdelle exhibited what is commonly recognized as his greatest piece of sculpture, The Dying Centaur. It is the man, a Herculean figure naked to the hips, who dies while the surviving beast of a horse remains strong, firm and forceful on its rock—but headless: that was Bourdelle's message to the world in the summer of 1914. It may be said that this one statue signals the beginning of Modernism in Montparnasse. Why, Bourdelle was asked, does the centaur die? "He dies like all the gods," the master replied, "because no one believes in him any more."
* Paris's first métro line, from Porte Maillot to Porte de Vincennes, was built within seventeen months and was opened on 19 July 1900, in time for the World Exposition. The director of works was the Breton engineer Fulgence Bienveniie, whose surname lends a traditional French word of welcome to travellers arriving at the Gare Montparnasse.
5
SAINT-GEFLMAIN-DES-PFLES
IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, belief became the central issue. "Every minute of the day I ask myself what I could be in the eyes of God," Jean-Paul Sartre puts in the mouth of a character in his play Le Diable et le bon dieu {The Devil and the Good Lord). "Now I know the answer: nothing. God does not see me, God does not hear me, God does not know me." Sartre did not take his atheism lightly. He devoted a large part of his most important philosophical work, L'Etre et le ne'ant (Being and Nothingness), to the problem of God and at one point, like Bourdelle, compared belief in God to a belief in the centaur: "To say that the centaur does not exist," he wrote, "is by no means to say that it is not possible." In a famous lecture on "Existentialism" which he gave at the end of the second war he began with the God problem, stating that his aim was not to demonstrate that God did not exist, but rath
er to show that "even if God existed that would change nothing." Man, with a consciousness which gave him total freedom of choice, projected himself as God: that was the principal argument of the sage of Saint-Germain-des-Pres.
Sartre is not popular today. "Unhappy 100!" chimed the Times Literary Supplement at the centenary of his birth in 2005. "Sartre's philosophy was never very coherent and means nothing now; his novels are unreadable" crowed Paul Johnson in the Literary Review. Comments in the French press were not much better. Memories are bitter because of Sartre's slide into Communism and the extreme left which began—one can give it a date—in 1952, around six months after the premiere of Le Diable etle bon dieu. The image many have of Sartre is that of an old man haranguing a few workers from the top of a barrel outside the Renault factory at Boulogne-Billancourt, or of him distributing a Maoist rag in Rue Daguerre, near Place Denfert-Rochereau, or of his mad defence on television of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist band.
Before 1952 Sartre was an individualist. The closest he came to recognizing collective action in Being and Nothingness, published in 1943, was—appropriately for us—in his example of commuters in the metro. Down in the métro in 1943 the traveller would look into the wan faces of other commuters and wonder silently what was their story—their broken families, their deported loved ones, their lost soldier. The last métro before the midnight curfew became a morbid ritual in occupied Paris, yet another kind of danse macabre. Only here there were no partners. All was performed in solitude. Sartre evoked the rhythm produced by striding commuters in the passageways, comparing it to the "cadenced march of soldiers," the "rhythmic work of a crew" (he had served on the front and had been a prisoner of war) or "dancers on the stage:" "the rhythm to which I give birth is born in connection with me and laterally as collective rhythm . . . It is finally our rhythm." But that is as far as he was willing to go; before 1952 Sartre's interest was focused on the free individual, necessarily finding himself in conflict with the freedom of others. In his métro example the signposts are all projected at me; "I am aimed at": "I avail myself of the opening marked 'Exit' and go through it." Sartre climbs the steps, with his mind still free; he turns home, alone. It is the hour of silent curfew throughout most of Sartre's hefty philosophical tome. How then could he subsequently align himself with the collectivist Communists? How was it possible?
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