Archives de la fonderie Rudier

Exceptional set of archives from the Rudier foundry: a manuscript register of castings (45 leaves and 8 loose leaves) and a set of 11 original silver print photographs. Housed in a box covered with a decorative paper. Register bound in a cloth, first cover detached; consolidated with a re-used cover from an insurance company sheet. Numerous tears on the covers, tears on a few pages not affecting the text, a few pages loose.
Extremely rare documents, to our knowledge unique set of archives to have survived the destruction of the molds and records of the Rudier foundry in 1952. The only other archives known to date only concern castings commissioned by the Rodin Museum.
Precious visual and manuscript archives of a place where both Rodin's and Giacometti's Walking Man were first cast into bronze. This exceptional notebook records the genesis of Cubist works of art, as well as timeless creations of Rodin and wonderful pieces of Art Deco sculpture.
Probably kept by a worker of the Rudier foundry between 1930 and 1952, this register of mostly bronze casts records an important part of 20th-century art history – the only surviving chronicles of the foundry where some of the most famous sculptures in modern art were made and are now exhibited in major museums and private collections.

The notebook records the casts of Giacometti masterpieces: L'Homme au doigt (1947), Grande Figure (1949), La Place (1950), Buste d'Homme (1950), La Roue de la fortune (1950) tracing back to his very first sculpture ever cast by Rudier (Femme couchée qui rêve, 1931). And casts of major Rodin sculptures, whom Rudier was the official founder: The Thinker, Monument to Balzac are recorded numerous times on the register and appear on two unpublished photographs taken at the foundry.

Includes a lot of entries for castings of Rodin's Kiss, sculptures from The Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais and The Age of Bronze. Also contains numerous entries for artworks by Bourdelle, Maillol, Zadkine, Renoir, Pompon, Jean Joachim, Paul Manship, Edgar Brandt, as well as Chana Orloff, Germaine Richier, Marie-Louise Simard, Céline Emilian, Claire Colinet ou Malvina Hoffmann, and many more.

11 unpublished photographs, only one was featured in L'Art et les artistes, 1936. These rare photographs show works by Rodin, his pupil Jules Desbois, and masterpieces of Art Deco sculpture by Antoine Bourdelle (Vierge à l'Offrande) and Joseph Bernard (Femme à l'enfant). In other photographs, foundry workers proudly pose next to major Parisian monuments, including a Wederkinch monument near the Eiffel Tower, a deer from the Versailles gardens restored at the foundry, the statue of Albert I (place de la Concorde), or a monumental angel from the Sacré-Coeur Church in Gentilly.
This collection offers a unique view inside a major place of artistic creation. The foundry thrived under the direction of Eugène Rudier, who became Rodin's appointed founder and was an undisputed master of the delicate art of sand casting (Laurence Betrand-Dorléac, The Art of Defeat (1940-1944)). He maintained a long and fruitful collaboration with world-renowned artists. Rudier gave Antoine Bourdelle shelter in his property, where he died in 1929. In 1947, Giacometti commissioned him to cast his very first Walking Man and visited him to admire his many Rodin sculptures: “One autumn day in 1950, Giacometti found himself in the park of the foundryman Eugène Rudier at Le Vésinet, and could not resist gazing at Eustache de Saint Pierre, one of the valiant Burghers of Calais [...] This irruption of the 'Grison' sculptor into one of Rodin's most emblematic works demonstrates once again his admiration for this great genius.”

The notebook (48 leaves) was certainly written by one of the foundry workers who worked for several decades in the Rudier atelier, providing precious information on the castings from 1930 until 1952, upon Rudier's death who required that all activity cease permanently after his passing. His archives and molds were burnt according to his wishes. This anonymous hand carefully recorded in chronological order the titles or descriptions of artworks, sometimes with sketches, with measurements and working hours needed for each sculpture. Famous sculptors are written in a sometimes delightfully fanciful spelling (“Giacometty”, “Mayol”, “Nooguchi”, “Alvina Offmann”) with comments such as “cubist style” for a work by Czaky; “skeletal woman” describing a Giacometti. Names of founders are listed alongside their work, such as the famous Lucien Thinot, others such as René Foucard, or anonymous people who contributed to the creation of true masterpieces (Yvon, François, Max, Batiste, Paulo, Léon, or Marin, who produced parts of the Burghers of Calais, among others).

Each page is covered with creations of the greatest sculptors: Rodin (some already mentioned, but also L'Exhortation, Saint Jean Baptiste, Tête de Balzac, bust of Georges Hecq and Etienne Clémentel, and many others), Antoine Bourdelle (L'Héraklès, Jeanne d'Arc, L'Eloquence, Séléné couchée, La Maternité, Monument à Mickiewicz, Asclepios, his very last work cast posthumously), Aristide Maillol (Buste de femme), Ossip Zadkine (Deux femmes, 1936 and many more), Joseph Csaky, Gutave Miklos, Paul Belmondo, Paul Manship, Edgar Brandt, Louis Leygue, Pierre-Marie Poisson, Pierre Traverse, Raoul Lamourdedieu, Léon-Ernest Drivier, Wheeler Williams, Robert Wlérick, Paul Niclausse, Paul Moreau-Vauthier, Andrew O' Connor, Victor Brenner, Constantin Dimitriadis, Jean Boucher, Georges Chauvel, Roger de la Fresnaye, Hubert Yencesse, Maxime Real del Sarte, Jean Terzieff, René Bertrand-Boutée, Gustave Pimienta, Georges Halbout du Tanney, Hubert Malfray, Georges Malissard, Louis de Monard, François Popineau, Raymond Delamarre, Casimir Reymond, Marius Roussel. It also contains fine examples of animal sculpture, including a panther by François Pompon, birds by Paul Artus, dogs by Christophe Fratin, or bronzes restored for the Versailles castle in 1935 (including a deer photographed at the foundry).

Pioneering women artists are very present throughout the pages including Chana Orloff, Germaine Richier, Marie-Louise Simard, Céline Emilian, Belgian sculptor Claire Colinet and the illustrious pupil of Rodin, the American Malvina Hoffmann. Many entries in the register record the close collaboration between Rudier, Rodin and Hoffmann in creative adventures of pharaonic proportions: the famous Gate of Hell, or Hoffmann's Hall of Man, an anthropological ensemble of 104 statues now in Chicago's Field Museum. The Rudier foundry quickly became known for its impeccable technique for monumental bronzes. Newspapers even called Eugène Rudier a titan executing “Cyclopean works” (André Wissant, L'Est républicain). The photographs in this set capturing the immense monument to General Alvéar by Antoine Bourdelle and the monumental Sacré-Coeur Angel by Georges Saupique still attest to the extraordinary creations of the Rudier atelier.

Our register is a rare historical source of the harrowing moments endured during Nazi Occupation and constitutes a valuable addition to research on this subject (Clare Finn, 2013, Françoise Gaborit, 2021). To ensure the survival of its activity, Rudier cast sculptures by Arno Breker, favorite artist of the Third Reich – including a bust of Adolf Hitler and a dozen works recorded in the notebook – exhibited at the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris in 1942. The foundry counted among its workers some great resistance fighters and lost one of its best molders, communist activist Jean-Pierre Timbaud. Shot alongside Guy Môquet in Châteaubriant on 22 October 1941, he died singing the Marseillaise. At the end of the war, the Rudier foundry played an important role in Holocaust Remembrance: the register contains entries for the monument by Nathan Rapoport commemorating the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Witness to a multi-faceted history, where art and totalitarianism were inextricably intertwined, this notebook also follows the radical evolutions of post-war art marked by Giacometti's long and aerial figures. At least five works (already mentioned) can be identified with certainty among the 15 entries in the register bearing the Giacometti's name, providing valuable details on casts, proofs, and names of the foundry workers. Giacometti appears in the last lines of this precious notebook and worked with Rudier until his death and the closing of the foundry in 1952.

This unique set of documents and photographs of exceptional artistic and historical value will undoubtedly fill many gaps in catalogues raisonnés of the most renowned artists of the 20th century.

With 11 photographs:
- Auguste Rodin (two photographs):
- a worker posing with The Thinker and The Monument to Balzac (11x8cm). "Janvier 1931" marked on the back.
- The Thinker in the foundry courtyard, in the background the Monument à La France Renaissante by Wederkinch (near the Eiffel Tower), and Antoine Bourdelle's Vierge à l'Offrande (4.2x6cm).
- Antoine Bourdelle: a photograph mounted on cardboard representing the equestrian statue of General Alvéar surrounded by the workers of the foundry (16,4x22,5cm) with a press clipping attached.
- Jules Desbois: Torse d'Homme with a worker (4x6cm).
- Joseph Bernard: Femme à l'enfant (5,5x8cm).
- Armand Martial: two photographs of the equestrian statue of Albert I (now in Paris, Place de la Concorde) surrounded by foundry workers (6x10.5cm and 5.5x8cm).
- Georges Saupique: one of the four monumental angels of the church of Sacré-Coeur in Gentilly (5,5x8cm). "September 1935" written on the back.
- a photograph of two workers pouring bronze into a mold (11,8x16,7cm), small missing lower right corner, a few small tears to the margins (published).
- a photograph of a bronze deer with a worker (11,4x8,5cm). Trace of horizontal fold in the upper part.
- a photographic portrait (17,1x23x1cm).
Special thanks to Nicolas Bourriaud for the identification of the bronzes on the photographs.