Charles Despiau

CHARLES DESPIAU (Mont-de-Marsan, 1874 - 1946).
"Assia.
Terracotta.
Exhibitions: "European sculpture of the 20th century", European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM), Barcelona, 2014.
Measurements: 86 cm (height).
Charles Despiau moved to Paris at the age of 17, on the occasion of a scholarship from the Landes department, and entered the School of Decorative Arts being a student of Georges Lemaire1 and later at the School of Fine Arts as well as in the studio the sculptor Louis-Ernest Barrias. In 1904 he married Marie Rudel.
Portraiture is Despiau's preference - which does not prevent him from creating statues especially in his later years - and he exhibits every year at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts. Through their plastic power and psychological truth, his portraits are very remarkable, thanks to a long and passionate work. In 1907, encouraged by the plaster bust of Paulette, Auguste Rodin asked him to work with him. This was the beginning of a period of professional practice until 1914, the year of his mobilization for the Great War. He was then forced to abandon the marble carving entrusted to him by Rodin of the Génie du Repos Eternel, intended for the memorial of the painter Puvis de Chavannes. The plaster, measuring two meters, had necessitated the hiring of a second workshop, Villa Corot, where Despiau had settled with his wife, Marie. Demobilized after the war and Rodin, who had died in 1917, refused to finish the carving of the marble of the Genius. The unfinished marble is currently exhibited in the gallery of the gardens of the Rodin museum in Paris. He frequented, back in Paris with a group of artists, which one day a journalist specialized in art named with great success the "Schnegg gang" , a group of sculptors where Lucien Schnegg, Gaston Schnegg's brother, was its main engine: Antoine Bourdelle, Robert Wlérick, Leon-Ernest Drivier, François Pompon, Louis Dejean, Alfred Jean Halou, Charles Malfray, Auguste de Niederhäusern, Henry Arnold (in French), Jane Poupelet, Yvonne Serruys... After Lucien's death in 1909, the band continues to gather around Gaston.
The plaster of Genius, donated to Despiau by Auguste Rodin, remained at the Villa Corot, then moved in 1930, to the rue Brillat-Savarin where he had his house and workshop built, when Charles Despiau finally meets success with his first exhibition-sale in New York. The heirs of this plaster, Mr. Alain Kotlar, after having cleaned and restored it, donated this "original" to the plaster museum of Meudon in 2001. The original bronze castings of the Genius are for sale at the Despiau workshop.
From 1932, the meeting with Assia Granatouroff, professional model that many artists from Dora Maar to Germaine Krull through Soutine, makes Despiau ask her to pose for him, which allows him to sublimate the woman's body. In his sculpture, strength, beauty, serenity, simplicity, Assia thus becomes the modern Venus of the Italian Renaissance, that even in the art of the twentieth century a journalist compared the art of Despiau as: "The Donatello of the twentieth century," said Anatole de Monzie. Assia is one of the most beautiful female nudes in the history of sculpture. It conforms to the canons of the beautiful young woman, it responds to the conception that is made of the ideal woman. Despiau's works can be found in many private collections around the world. As for museums, his works can be found, in particular in the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris (legacy of a very important number of sculptures and drawings made by his wife, Maria, at his death,2), the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris, the Museum of Mont-de-Marsan. Numerous museums abroad, including the National Museum of Fine Arts in Algiers.