THE BOURGEOIS OF CALAIS BY MICHEL BERNARD
By narrating the creation of Rodin’s sculpture, The Bourgeois of Calais, Michel bernard pays a magnificent tribute to its sponsor, the mayor of the municipality, Omer Dewavrin. A story of friendship, genius and tenacity.
Calais was not always an illegal transit camp for migrants, the departure of the tunnel to cross the Channel, or a finalist football club for the Coupe de France. Calais was often associated, for decades, with a major sculpted work, immortalized by a postage stamp: bronze ” The Bourgeois of Calais »From Rodin.
Six characters in suffering, led by Eustace of Saint Peter, deliver themselves, at the start of the Hundred Years War, to the King of England at the end of a long siege, so that their fellow citizens and their city are spared: work monumental, world famous, reproduced twelve times around the world from New York to Seoul via London or Basel.
We know that this sculpture is the work of Rodin, a man then forty-four years old, whose name is increasingly beginning to emerge in the firmament of the arts. Decried by the partisans of the ancient tradition, received by his master and having preceded “Père Rude”, he imposes a new vision of sculpture, giving life and words to characters who move and act as in real life.
Rodin is known, soon recognized. Much less is the sponsor of the work as the centenary of the French Revolution approaches, the mayor Omer Dewavrin, notary, established notable, who will, under the spell of Camille Claudel’s future lover, become a supporter of an extraordinary statue both in form, horizontal, and in substance, six characters in pain and not six heroic characters.
Michel bernard we had seduced with his work Two remorse by Claude Monet in which the writer, moving away from a traditional biography, succeeded in penetrating us into the intimate universe of the impressionist painter obsessed with his easel and his tubes of paint. Based this time on the correspondence between the chosen one and the artist, the writer tells us about the birth and then the blossoming of a beautiful friendship which is reminiscent of that between Clémenceau and the painter from Giverny. .
It is the mayor who plays the essential role here, a good man, modest, who does not know himself, trained in classical culture, which seduces him in a work contrary a priori to his initial tastes and which half understands words the genius of this heavy, massive silhouette, with the flowery beard so close to the general allure of Claude Monet.
Captivated by looking at the faces of these men frightened by death, he understands how Monet than : ” (…) this gaze which went beyond human existence and probed the past and the future, the infinite, was only the imprint of Rodin’s thumbs in wet chalk “. The notary is, with the immense sculpture, the real subject of the book. He gives more than he receives from Rodin, but he feels this work in creation almost as his own.
Without Gertrude Stein, Picasso’s work would still have spread throughout the world, but with delay and greater difficulties. Without Omer Dewavrin, The Bourgeois, would have remained hidden in the hands which “had the faith” ofAuguste Rodin. It will therefore take ten years for the statue to be finally inaugurated in 1895.
The repeated and frequent procrastination of Rodin These successive delays are not unrelated, but the opposition of elected officials, the dominant conformist atmosphere, political struggles, a financial crisis and a cholera epidemic bear witness to the difficulty of detecting an artistic work ahead of its time. These procrastinations, hesitations remind us of the frightening cries in front of the installation of the columns of Buren, in front of the pyramid of the Louvre of Pey.
As Rodin states, “ Nothing great had ever risen without creating surprise “. The writer, who could not forget Monet, as an indispensable parallel figure, by the grace of his words, of his shiny and smooth style like the thousand-fold polished bronze of Rodin’s bodies, thus gives thanks for the difficulty of creating, but also a tribute to the women and men who are essential passers-by for geniuses. Fortunately Omer Dewavrin still lives. His bust was sculpted by Rodin in 1885.