Imposing Bronze The Wrestlers By Jef Lambeaux Belgium Bronze

Superb bronze signed twice with the mark of the founder Robert Debraz of Brussels engraved in the bronze. Trained at the Antwerp Academy, Jef Lambeaux brought a breath of fresh air to Belgian sculpture from 1870. Rejecting the classicism that had long prevailed, he introduced a baroque realism in the choice and treatment of his subjects. The movement of the bodies, the description of the anatomy, the realism of the scenes shocked the public but also enchanted a more progressive fringe. Nicknamed the "Michelangelo of the stream", he shook up the codes. Thus, the theme of the fight, like the fight of the gladiators of Antiquity, was treated by the artist in different works, from 1881 but moving away from the ancient influence: "Wherever man deploys the prestige of his strength, said Lambeaux, I will study and admire him. (...) But what, in this order of ideas, has always struck me the most, are the fights in the fairground booths. I grasp there, in the unexpectedness of the action, admirable plays of musculature. In the naked and arched torsos, in the stiffening of the limbs, I distinguish planes and lines of a real beauty. "In this work, he dares to show a man completely overturned, who seems irremediably doomed to fall. Two large diagonals structure the scene creating a dynamic. This model will be declined in different sizes and versions as is the case for many sculptures of the time. The work is reproduced in the book art Forest