Sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle

Nineteenth-century France produced few greater sculptors than Antoine Bourdelle, and fewer still who had greater effect on sculptors of the twentieth century. Rodin, his longtime friend and teacher, called him a "pathfinder of the future." Bourdelle spread his influence by teaching and writing, and both Giacometti and Germaine Richier served apprenticeships in his studio.

But Bourdelle was more than just a teacher and innovator. His friezes adorn theatres in Paris and Marseilles; his monuments stand in Paris, Warsaw and Buenos Aires. He completed 876 sculptures before his death in 1929, as well as over 6000 drawings, gouaches and watercolors. Anatole France, another friends, called Bourdelle "the most illustrious Frenchman of his time."

His scutlptures at the Fogg range in style from the smooth, sinuous grace of "Torso of the Figure Called Fruit" to the chiselled strength of his archer "Heracles;" from the classical serenity of his "Head of the Figure Called Strength" to the expressionistic grimacing of his head of Beethoven. Rodin created individuals; Bourdelle, types. He idealized, modeling a Hercules who epitomized brute strength and a nude who was simply a series of smooth curves, more goddess than woman. His nude and his Hercules look totally different, but they reveal the same approach toward art, the same distillation of natural extremes.

Most of Bourdelle's work produces its effect through form alone. Even his expressionistic "Bethoven" has little emotional impact. On the other hand, one can easily appreciate the balance in his "Heracles" between the verticals of the rock against which Hercules braces his forward foot, of his upraised brow and of the line of his head, body and right thigh, and the horizontals of his extended left leg and arm. Less rigid, but little less effective, is the way in which the soft, swelling contours of his "Cloud" are echoed by those of the nude who reclines on it.

The Fogg has assembled most of Bourdelle's best and best-known independent works. His friezes and monuments obviously could not be collected. This is unfortunate, not only because of the quality of the work omitted, but because Bourdelle himself believed that sculpture fulfilled its highest function as an integral part of architecture. Bourdelle might have thought that the current exhibition gave an incomplete picture of his work. It does. But it gives a very impressive one.