Text/Cao Qinghui,
Professor of the Department of Art History of the Central Academy of Fine Arts, doctoral supervisor, vice chairman of the Beijing Literary and Art Critics Association, and member of the Jiusan Society. Committed to the teaching, scientific research, writing and exhibition of modern Chinese art history and art education history of academic activities planning, once served as the Chinese cooperative professor of the Getty Foundation International Art Research Project, planned the exhibition has won the Ministry of Culture's National Art Museum Annual Collection and Annual Exhibition Excellent Project, authored "Chinese Paintings Into the Academy", edited "Chinese Modern Art Road Atlas", etc. and edited academic exhibition catalogues and academic conference proceedings, published many papers in journals and academic conferences at home and abroad and won awards.
Focusing on Chinese students and the French sculptor Buddell, the paper sorts out Buddell's translation and exhibition in China from 1928 to 2018, especially examines the interaction between Chinese students and Buddell in the first half of the 20th century, and collects and summarizes the comments of Chinese students on Buddell at that time.
1. The French sculptor Boudell
Born in 1861 in Montauban, France, Boudre (1861-1929), who was born in 1861 to a family of carpenters, had attended the École d'Arte école Toulouse and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris (hereinafter referred to as "École Nationale d'Arte") as a teenager, but in 1884 he was admitted to the sculpture studio of Professor Gaume Falguière (1831-1900) in Paris with the second place, and it is said that he was dissatisfied with the academic education. Rather than having an opinion about the tutor himself. The following year, Budel rented a studio in Manns Lane (now the Buddell Museum) and began to work independently, with the sculptor Dalu (1838-1902), who lived next to him. Beginning in 1893, Buddell's artistic life began to intersect with the French modern sculptor Rodin (1840-1917), who was responsible for transforming Rodin's plaster works into marble as Rodin's hired and assistant. For the next fifteen years, Boudre was more deeply involved in Rodin's sculpture until rodin's death in 1917.
After Rodin's death, Boudell soon won social fame in the French art world such as "One Man After Rodin" and "The Pillar of Modern European Sculpture", which is also familiar to Chinese students. On October 1, 1929, when Boudle died of illness at the age of 68, the Paris newspaper announced to the world with the headline "The French art world is mourned", which showed his pivotal position in France and the art world at that time. Buddell died, but his art and influence were not cooled by people's departure, but the time, place, and people were recorded in the annals of history and became the object of art history. First of all, we know that Buddell was a disciple of Rodin's sculpture career and a traitor to Rodin's sculpture art, which is full of stories of art trends and artists that make art historians feel interesting. Rodin once praised Buddell without hesitation, saying, "I see you're doing something I could hardly think of." I thought it was great at the beginning, and it gave me a hunch —yes, it's all in concrete form. You illuminate the road to the future. And this sculptor who illuminated the way to the future died in the decade before the outbreak of World War II, did not encounter nazi coercion and political choice embarrassment, so political innocence, no major historical issues, so the artistic evaluation of him at that time and in later generations did not bring national justice and emotions to some other sculptors, but could give an objective evaluation and positioning from his lifelong creative and educational achievements. This was the case with his painter friend Maurice Danny (1870-1943) in the Weekly Review magazine Tribute to Antoine Boudre, a week after his death. Maurice Danny said:
All the artists—the French, the Nordics, the Latins, the Central Europeans, the Americans—considered him a master and revered his talents.
Between Rodin and Mayor, he held a place that was roughly comparable in France to that of Phuket and Ruud. As they did, Buddell made a modern transformation of those exemplary works of ancient sculpture, especially ancient Greek sculpture.
He was at peace of mind and lived a hard-working and passionate life of a craftsman. He was very kind to young people and never harshly criticized their studies. He always tried to understand them, which cultivated the passion of young people. He loved his students and worked hard to lead them to improve their artistic attainments and lead them to perfection. It is precisely because he loves his students that he respects their ideas. His speech is like a buzzing bee, spreading, with a peculiar eloquence, the paradox of curiosity and the truth of wisdom. The only thing he allowed himself to be distracted was to tell and write about his art.
More future significance is that in 1949, with the unremitting efforts of Buddell's widow, his mansion and studio were built as a museum, so that the original appearance of the studio showed the purpose and characteristics of Boudell's creation and life, which not only made the museum rank among the forests of Museums in Paris, but also laid the foundation for Boudell and his artistic flow for hundreds of years. Boudell was a diligent worker, of which "Hercules the Archer", completed from 1906 to 1909, is one of his proud masterpieces, which was rebuilt in 1986 and rebuilt in 1986 at the Musée d'Orsay, the temple of modern art in France, and was exhibited publicly, becoming a model of modern French sculpture worshipped and studied by audiences from all over the world. The glory of being able to enjoy it in a museum is not something that can be obtained by famous artists behind them. The painter Wu Guanzhong said that when he returned to Paris in the 1980s and looked for his mentor Suferpi in the museum, he suddenly found that he could not find the works of this "important painter who shocked Paris around the 1940s and 1950s, and an academician of the Académie de France". The elimination and refresh of history is cruel! So far, we can easily see Buddell and his sculptural art in the French Art History and Museum, with its own logic of time, place, people and indispensable.
Boudell Museum, Paris
Hercules the Archer, displayed in the hall of the Boudre Museum in Paris
Rodin and Buddell do have many differences in the art of sculpture, but from the theme of this article, the biggest difference between Budel and Rodin is that he is interested in education, and he is indeed more distracted and practical than his master to devote himself to educational practice, rather than just focusing on completing the order and free creation. As early as 1900, Buddell, together with Rodin and Jules de Bois, opened the Rodin Academy, enrolling about fifty students to teach sculpture, but the conditions lasted only three or four months before closing. But Buddell seemed to be reluctant about this, and in 1909, at the age of forty-eight, Buddell was hired by the Large Hut Studio and began a teaching career that focused on teaching once a week from October to July of the following year, spreading his sculptural teaching to artists and enthusiasts from all over the world for twenty years, rain or shine, until his death in 1929. In the past twenty years, the peach and plum world has become its own, and among the people who come and go, there is no shortage of Chinese students who come and go for their dreams and lives. When Rodin died in 1917, he had not yet encountered the wave of Chinese young people studying in France after the "May Fourth", but Buddell, who died twelve years later, was just in time, which was an opportunity and honor that history gave To Budel and Chinese students.
The Large Thatched Cottage Studio at 14 Rue Grande In paris
Second, Buddell is in China
The current introduction of Buddell by Chinese students began with Li Jinfa's article "Buder's Sculpture" published in 1928 in the "Aesthetic Education Magazine" edited by Li Jinfa. In this promotion article from ninety years ago, Li Jinfa introduced the characteristics and methods of Budel's sculpture education in a considerable amount of space, which is impressive. Li Jinfa said:
Buder absolutely attaches great importance to teaching, and he thinks that it is all about creating the great artists of the future. He thought that a sculptor should know how to paint, should not specialize in finger sculpting clay, should use tools to paint mud, and know the work of turning plaster, can know the difference between driving plaster and mud, because one is to produce light and shadow, one to reduce light and shadow, but also to let know from now on that, no matter how well turned, it is not like the original work of clay sculpture, because the two elements are different, such as a student who wants to implement his work on the stone, he should also do all the work of looking at the chiseling and so on, and the original spirit can be transferred to the stone. This method is a disciple of the Renaissance Vansi as Verrochio, Michelangelo as a disciple of Ghirlandajo and Donatello and the nameless silversmith.
……
He often taught people how to organize a work, and after a long period of rethinking, and then practice, nothing is allowed to be left alone, carving is as correct as science, Pasteur did not hesitate to turn thousands of times to prove his doctrine, and to achieve the correct invention. Artists should have this attitude as well. Only when you have a deep understanding of yourself can you change yourself, otherwise, you may be in danger of going astray at any time.
He wanted his students to do their best to develop their individual personalities, he wanted each student to become a learned and intelligent person, he discussed with them the works in the museum, the rhyme of the cathedral, he asked them to read more, to think more, to look around at the life around them, he advised them to dabble in other arts, such as literature, music, pictures, etc., so as to make a sound spirit.
Li Jinfa's introduction took the first step of "Buddell in China", and since then, there have been some articles directly or indirectly related to Budell in the Republic of China periodicals, the number is small and the translation name of Bourdelle is not uniform, there are "Buder", "Park Hortel", "Pudaier", "Pudaier", "Bourdell" and other translations, the basic situation of these articles Will be discussed in section VI of this article. In the 1950s, under the international Cold War pattern, China fell to the Soviet Union in an all-round way, and the way of art introduction to the outside world mainly settled in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and other third-world friends, so there was no special translation of Buddell's sculpture art in this period, but if you think that the artists at that time could not learn the relevant information of France and Budel, it is not realistic. In fact, through the life and creation of the pioneer and model of sculpture set up by the socialist camp, the Soviet female sculptor Muhina (1889-1953), it is not difficult to know that her teacher is Budel, but the description of the Paris painting world and Buddell's teaching in Apollina's "Vi I Muhina" in the Soviet Union is as follows:
In early 1912, Musina... Go abroad to Paris. At this time, it was a time when Western art was in deep crisis. Sculpture, like painting and architecture, has lost its own humanist content and no longer expresses the progressive ideals of the present. Many great sculptors sacrificed the ideas and images of works of art in order to worship abstract forms of sculpture, limiting their art to the narrow scope of pursuing form.
In Paris, Musina joined a private art studio, where the famous French sculptor Buddell was teaching. The studio is hung with the sign "College", and many students of different nationalities and ages study there. Boudell teaches the theory of sculpture at length, and in his lectures, he strives to explain the principles of representing the human body and the laws that make up the body in shaping art. He ignores the psychological essence of the figure and only emphasizes the meaning of isolated sculptural forms.
For a considerable period, Musina fell into an atmosphere of laboratory-like, practically formalist exploration by the so-called masters of France, influenced by Buddell's creations.
The above ultra-left view of literature and art, which originated from the Soviet Union and seriously opposed or even distorted the pursuit of form and ideological content, gradually retreated in the 1980s with the advocacy of emancipating the mind and reform and opening up, and the translation and introduction of Buddell also began to return to the interrupted past. In 1982, China appeared the first collection of works introducing Buddell sculpture "Buddell Sculpture Collection", in terms of content, it mainly refers to the Japanese sculptor Shimizu Tachi Yoshishi (1897-1981) published in 1944 "Buder", in the preface the editor will rodin, Budell, Mayor and called Rodin, Budell, And Mayor the "three pillars of modern sculpture" in the history of world art, and such a definition is not uncommon in the articles of Chinese students in the 30s, and Lu Xun also included Rodin in the "French Modern Sculpture Theory" in 1934. Budel, Mayor (1861-1944), and Pena are regarded as the four major sources of modern sculpture. Obviously, none of these claims were created by East Asian studies, but were moved from France, as we read in the first section of Maurice Danny's commentary.
In 1990 and 2009, China translated and published "Buddell on Art and Life" published in 1981 by different publishing houses and different translators, which was originally the result of Boudell's widow's vast posthumous manuscripts in the vast expanse of her deceased husband, including notes, correspondence, speeches, and answers, edited by a friend named Varenne, and was the first compilation of Boudell's artistic and life insights half a century after his death. This is also the first essay on Buddell's art and life introduced in China, and its publication not only reflects the vitality of China's opening up to the outside world but also meets the needs of sculpture development in the process of China's modernization and urbanization. After the compilation and publication of Budell's sculpture works and artistic insights since the 1980s, this translation of "Buddell" began to be gradually and uniformly used in the art world, and the various translations that were extremely inconsistent in the past basically withdrew from the historical stage.
After 2000, two more abundant collections of Buddell's works - Bao Haining edited "BOURDELLE Buder 1869-1929" (Jilin Fine Arts Publishing House, 2010), Xiaosheng edited "Contemporary European and American Figurative Art Series Bouder" (Jiangxi Fine Arts Publishing House, 2013) - published successively, "Buddell on Art and Life" After the publication of "Budel on Art and Life" The impact of the publication also began to appear in professional reading, Professor Zhu Shangxi of the Sculpture Department of Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts in "Notes on Reading Buddell's Notes" He not only shared his understanding of the concepts and techniques of the modeling of Budel's important works in various periods, but also shared his interpretation of the sculptural thinking and wisdom hidden behind Buddell's literary rhetoric as a professional sculptor. But more importantly, Buddell finally came to China after being introduced ninety years later, and the Tsinghua University Art Museum, with the assistance of the Paris Museum Alliance and the Buddell Museum, introduced an exhibition entitled "Return and Reinvention: Buddell and His Sculptural Art" in the autumn of 2017 and published a catalogue of the same name in the spring of 2017. The exhibition is an extension of "Buddell and Ancient Greece and Rome – A Modern Passion" organized by the Bouder Museum from October 2017 to February 2018, and exhibits a series of works and other photo and video documents such as "The Torso of Pallas", "Apollo the God of War", "Hercules the Archer", "Fruit", "Penelope", "Rodin", "The Dying Centaur" and "Reliefs of the Champs Elysées Theatre". It is the arrival of this exhibition with high level of planning standards that not only historically enriches the actual content of "Buddell in China", but also stimulates us to think about the problem of "Buddell and China". The above rough outline of academic history and the following rough investigation of art history are derived from this inspiration.
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