Connections

The sale of the contents of Howard Hodgkin's house is a neither here nor there but when one gets the opportunity to visit not only an artist's studio but his house or apartment as well, then there exists the opportunity to learn so much more. Perhaps this wouldn't have been the case with Hodgkin, but it was. This is an unseemly cash up and the baby is going down  with the bathwater.

This is the Musee Bourdelle in Montparnasse. The museum has at it's heart the apartment, studio and workshop of Bourdelle, it's a joy.

I have visited this museum many times, it's a place that resonates for me, I know the problems that beset me also populated the minds of the people who sat around the huge 'refectory' table in the studio. The table was made by Bourdelle's father, run your hand over it's grain and know that Bourdelle did the same, it's connecting, affirming. If you belong to the uber confident, sure, cocksure  cutting edge 'art scene' you may well not get this, but there was a deadly virus of doubt that we lucky ones were inoculated with when post figurative angst really kicked off. Bourdelle was famously an assistant to Rodin and he only just recovered from that privilege. When Jack the Lad, I worked in three sculptors studios and it's not the craft you acquire it's the crack, the taste for the coffee, the connection. The craft is now almost redundant, these days you buy it, pop down to Pangolin with a doodle on a tissue and they will translate it into a monumental bronze, a resin or a marble, just sign the cheque, instant artist, brilliant.

Bourdelle does it for me, he was a contender for greatness, and the contenders are always the really interesting ones. There is brilliant work to see here, you could imagine Bourdelle invented the monumental, walk around the great structures, wonder at the craft and then go and find some of the subtle fin de siecle portraits and busts.

Go and soak up the pathos of the Centaure mourant, the Dying Centaur, it's a work of brilliance, but more than anything visit for the table, the drapes, the dust, the stands, get connected.