Bust Of Princess Maleine Or Mélisande

Around 1890 A pupil of the famous Toulouse sculptor Alexandre Falguière at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he entered in 1884, Georges Charles Coudray subsequently exhibited regularly at the Salon des Artistes Français between 1883 and 1890; He exhibited there until 1903 many busts and statuettes. His corpus consists of sculptures in bronze, natural stone, plaster and patinated or polychrome terracotta depicting elegant young women drawn mainly from the literature of his time, or from Greek or Eastern mythology. The artist also produces decorative art objects in silver and metal for the German factory Orivit. More than any other language in the field of Decorative Arts, Art Nouveau proves to be close to literature. Most of his plastic creations immediately echo contemporary literary works. The pieces of the Belgian writer Maurice Maeterlinck constituted a great source of inspiration for the artists of this period, including the musicians. The composer Claude Debussy composed after him the lyric opera Pelléas et Mélisande in 1902 for the Opéra-Comique in Paris. The narrative framework is indeed an essential aesthetic component of the Art Nouveau style, and the stories it illustrates refer as much to the natural and plant world as to the one that lives in the artist's mind. Art Nouveau is intimately linked to Poetry. He develops the idea that all the paraphernalia of daily life (composed of chairs, tables, pottery, decorative objects and clothing) can reflect a poetic exploration. Each object becomes a poem, thus mirroring the inner life of its owner. Within the Bernanosian universe, the "inner life" refers to the world of childhood, love, holiness and honor, allowing man alone to approach and rediscover these primary states. . If, paradoxically, the modern civilization in which Art Nouveau is embedded seeks to cut off access to the mind through the negation of inner life, all the magic of the Art Nouveau universe offers the possibility for everyday objects to embody this concept of love, beauty, melancholy and radiate an erotic energy. More than any other artistic visual expression, of which Surrealism is heir, Art Nouveau was born in a literary and poetic milieu which cradled the creations of its members. The cultural circle formed by the Symbolist writers and painters who came to the fore in Paris from 1860 merged with the vision of the generation of young decorators in the 1890s. Painters such as Odilon Redon and Paul Gauguin served as vital organs between poets and decorators, like the two leading currents of Symbolist painting at the time of the emergence of Art Nouveau, which were the Nabis and that of the Rose-Croix. Our polychrome terracotta bust depicts a symbolist young woman with a haughty and magical bearing, with a face delicately oriented to the right and a modestly restrained gaze. Dressed in a medieval-style blue tunic, her long wavy hair falls over her shoulders, held back at the forehead and girded with a beaded ribbon in the center.