Faun With A Bunch Of Grapes, Gilbert Privat (1892-1969), Terracotta In High Relief

Gilbert Privat (Toulouse, 1892 – Soulac, 1969)

Faun with a Bunch of Grapes

Original terracotta in high relief, 38.5 × 28 × 5 cm
Signed at the bottom right

“Some declined words and the synthesis of Cubism; others, like the Greek sculptors of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC and, later, the discoverers of the 5th and 4th centuries, followed the path of deepening and refinement. This was Privat’s choice. He remained and would remain within the family of the new classicists of the 20th century. Yet one senses in his work, particularly in his sketches, a taste for beautiful inflections and subtle elongations which, in painting, appear at the same time in Dupas and Pougheon.”

Bruno Foucart
Preface to the catalogue of the Privat exhibition at the André Lemaire Gallery, 1992

   The son of a modest wood sculptor, Gilbert Privat trained at the Fine Arts School in Toulouse, then in Paris under Jules Coutan. Winner of the second Grand Prix de Rome in 1919, he began exhibiting two years later at the Salon des Artistes Français, winning a silver medal in 1925 and a gold medal in 1926. His accomplished craft earned him numerous commissions, ranging from fountains for the USA to panels for ocean liners, monumental statues, and commemorative monuments. In 1939, Privat decorated the façade of the French pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. His creations blend a mythological universe with serene female figures—sometimes mothers and children, sometimes deer—and at times simple faces carved into slate.
The artist belongs to those who, during the interwar period, forged a new and final classicism, following in the footsteps of Jean Dupas and Alfred Janniot. Vigorously modeled in clay, our faun, powerfully posed, with his rugged face, rather evokes Bourdelle.