Emile Antoine Bourdelle was one of the leaders of twentieth century monumental sculpture and qualified by Rodin as "a pioneer of the future". Unlike academic sculptors and their moralizing grandiloquence and superfluous ornamentation, Bourdelle chose to depict rigorous structure and a powerful rhythm, likely reflective of his peasant past. The artist's goal was to capture the whole and recreate it, a very dissimilar approach to most of his contemporaries. The great philosopher Henri Bergson admired his approach and his artistry: "What strikes me as soon as I look at one of your works is that each part seems to contain the whole. Isn't that the mark of perfection?"

A notion central to Bourdelle's aestheti...