ABSTRACT
Antoine Bourdelle's is a mind filled with the epic dreams of ancient and medieval cultures, his forms are at once an echo and an embrace of anonymous masterworks. His vision sublimely immune to that sense of irony and skepticism that for a century or more has been the standard modern response to heroic postures and unbridled eloquence. What separates Bourdelle from his successors in the search for "primitive" roots is the European-bound limits of his imagination. Bourdelle belongs to the last generation of European artists for whom the unity, vitality, and priority of European culture could be taken as an unquestioned, untroubled, and indeed unconscious article of faith. It is interesting to note that A. Giacometti worked with Bourdelle in the early 1920's, for in Giacometti all trace of that once imperious confidence is gone. Doubt, anxiety, crisis become the very medium in which the sculptor works.
