Garden

Antoine Bourdelle • Les nobles fardeaux

A student at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Toulouse and later at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, Antoine Bourdelle trained in the studios of Alexandre Falguière and then Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. From 1890 to 1903, he worked as an assistant to Auguste Rodin. From 1909 onwards, he taught at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, where he trained many artists, including Alberto Giacometti, Henri Matisse, Aristide Maillol and Germaine Richier.
Very early on, he abandoned modelling in favour of a construction based on planes. He drew much of his inspiration from archaic Greek art and Romanesque art, whose formal rigour and spiritual power he admired, expressed through simplified volumes and deliberately sketchy modelling. In ‘Les Nobles fardeaux’, an evocation of a medieval Virgin and Child or a Greek korê bearing offerings transposed into everyday life, the artist took his wife Cléopâtre as his model.