Studio: international art (87.1924)

SCULPTURE EN TAILLE DIRECTE

those of Gauguin and Van Gogh and the
whole modern school which has sprung
from them. This latest effort was due to a
desire to get back to more than the primi-
tive in art; it was a determination to get
back to the instinct which prompted primi-
tive art, and not only its successes, but its
many failures as judged by common
aesthetic principles, have justified the effort.
There is to-day a simpler feeling in
aesthetic projection ; a desire to do without
the lessons of the great masters in art and
to drink afresh at the original springs. 0
The strongest proof of the unquench-
able demand for exploration into the mean-
ing of art is the appreciation of very recent
and contemporary productions such as
those of Benin and other living tribes
which have art works to show, and what
tribes have not i 0 0 0 0

It is in France that there is a school of
direct carvers. Its prophet is that great
sculptor, Joseph Bernard, son of the valley
of the Rhone, born in 1866, pupil for a
little while only of schools of art, then
master on his own account, producing the
modelled bronzes of The Woman with the
Pitcher in the Luxembourg, and others of
equal beauty, and then turning to direct
carving in stone and producing works of
striking and original beauty. Bernard is
hailed, however, not only as the primitive
carver, but as the modern exponent of the
archaic spirit in art. But his work is by no
means of a type ; his Satyr is quite dif-
ferent from his Singer, the former sig-
nalising a mythic character, the latter
periodising itself as early Greek. The heads
called The Smile, Plenitude, and Sketch
from Nature respectively, all in stone, are
just natural women of to-day seen by the
spirit of a day long passed, and they con-
trast with the more cultured forms of a
head and two hands in Siena marble seen
at the Salon d’Automne in 1920. A more
Gothic feeling is discernible in the roughly
carved but strangely moving half-figure in
granite, The Prayer; while the granite
heads, The Aigrette and The Faun, the
former with polished face surface, are more
Egyptian in spirit. 0000
Bernard goes back beyond the Greeks
and the Egyptians and beyond the existing
races to the primitive originative impulse,
and his works convey the same feeling as

EARLY STAGE OF DIRECT
CARVING OF A PANEL. BY
JOSEPH BERNARD (MARBLE)

do those of the archaic sculptors. They are
not imitative ; no one would ever confuse
them with the work of the real primitive ;
but the same artistic pristine instinct
animates them. 0000
Another type of woman is adumbrated
in The Girl with a Pitcher in the Luxem-
bourg, and the dancing Woman and Child,
both modelled works and quite differently
conceived from the carved Bacchante and
the high relief, The Grape Festival. These
are the inspired masterpieces of the en taille
directe school in France. They are brought
to the utmost pitch of elaboration and yet
betray no superfine finish; but they are
finished, and not only the inner spirit of the
stone from which they have been created
breathes from them, but the surfaces are
wrought to a state of exquisite perfection
which only love could have accomplished.
Herein lies the abiding difference between
the modeller who leaves his work at the
stage of the plaster casting and the carver
who leaves it but when the last touch of the
chisel has symbolised the kiss of creation
and farewell. There are modellers who, like
Havard Thomas in England, cared to work
on the surfaces of their bronzes with file
and chisel, and there are many modellers
who work on the marble and stone when
the pointer’s task is done : but the joy of
one who has conceived and brought forth
from the body of stone a living image of his
own thought is transcendant; the image is
more his own since he saw its conception
in the unhewn matrix in which he has per-
formed the miracle. 0000

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