"the White Bear" Anonymous Cast After Pompon

"The Polar Bear" Anonymous cast based on Pompon's model This sculpture, shaped in the spirit of POMPON's models, has the particularity of its dimensions: with a length of 85 cm, it reaches a size almost double that of the reduced casts of Pompon's polar bear. This is the whole point of this unobtainable piece, which is indeed a copy cast in homage to the work of the great sculptor. This bronze is original in more than one way: original in its dimensions, original in its anonymity, and finally original in its price, compared to the hundreds of posthumous casts from the various original plaster models or, more often, overmoldings that regularly appear on the market for fluctuating values depending on the vintage of their production. They are nevertheless all reproductions signed POMPON, even though he never signed these works! All posthumous casts bear the signature made by the foundry that affixed its stamp and not by the sculptor, because Pompon did not sign his plasters. This apocryphal signature was added to the foundry plaster for purely commercial purposes… It is regrettable that upon his death, reproduction rights were confused with those of disclosure, resulting in the proliferation of bronze editions based on studio plasters and overmoldings. Thus, the exploitation of the Pompon bear was a boon for the market, while Pompon's will stipulated that all means of reproduction should be destroyed! Our large-scale bronze with a black patina has appeared on the market only once in the last ten years. Of unknown artist, founder, and period, only its volume and well-understood plastic make it an accomplished art copy and not a mass-produced reproduction. With his polar bear, Pompon radically transformed animal sculpture: he was no longer in the anatomy, he was in the interpretation of the emotions generated by the animal. Eliminating accessories and details, he abandoned all realistic rendering to focus on "the very essence of the animal." This economy of means gives the work a presence that finds its true strength in its monumental scale. Far from being anecdotal, it reveals the search for timelessness, for permanence: beneath the silent exterior of solid forms, the world of smooth sculpture becomes the place where an aspiration to universal form blossoms. "I preserve a large number of details destined to disappear," said Pompon. François Pompon's Polar Bear is an emblematic work of modern animal art. Its success has not waned since its presentation at the 1922 Salon, where it allowed its author, then aged 67, to finally achieve celebrity after a lifetime spent in the shadow of the great masters of his time. Indeed, for most of his career, François Pompon was a practitioner, working with Auguste Rodin from 1890, then with Antonin Mercié, Alexandre Falguière, and René de Saint-Marceaux. It was only very late in life that he put his personal projects forward, notably after having decided to take only animals as his subjects, from 1905. He then adopted a very particular and eminently modern approach: not to attach himself to realism and to seek to reach the very essence of the beast, gradually eliminating, "all these frills", as he himself said, in favor of rounded forms, which translate the timeless presence of the animal. The polished surface, playing with the light, reinforces the monumentality of the sculpture. In 1918, Pompon presented his first sculpture of a brown bear, head bowed. As a hard worker, he did not stop there. The White Bear was officially born in 1922, but the artist went through phases of doubt after the State commissioned a model in Lens stone, today kept at the Musée d'Orsay. From 1926 onwards, he made several modifications to his lost-wax bronze reductions, seeking to improve what he considered his masterpiece. François Pompon was so proud of this sculpture, which had since become his signature, that he nailed a plaster head to the door of his studio.