One of the great pleasures of living in Paris is leaving, and returning home to the South of France. The three and half-hour train journey starts at Gare de Lyon, amongst the loud bustle of a station and a busy city - impatient taxis and buses honking, sirens screeching, motorbikes and bicycles zigzagging between the traffic, the metro continuously pouring passengers into the station, and all the people running around to catch their train, eyes glued on screens, dragging suitcases, dragging children, pushing pushchairs, fully absorbed in the quest at hand: finding the platform, finding the wagon, finding one’s seat. One has to elbow one’s way through the crowd with determination and temerity, the slightest hesitation and one will be run into, cut across, glared at. There is a pace to maintain ! How dare you slow the crazy rhythm down !
Leaving Paris, the weather always seems morose: grey sky, miserable drizzle, cold breeze. One only ever sees the clouds in Paris. Surely, this cannot be the case, but it is the image that I have painted in my mind of the city. I get into the train with the desire to escape. I think most people do. Faces are drawn and gaunt, but there are also faint sparkles in the eyes, lit by the hope of holidays or a return home, and the idea of the beautiful destination which awaits them.
The smooth pull and the soft rumble of the train put me to sleep: it is the spell of train travel. It lifts shortly after Lyon. The awakening is enchanting: the shape and colours of the landscape have changed, the colours are more vivid - deep greens, all the browns of scorched rocky land, and the brilliant blue of the sky. Outside the window, there is the promise of warm, sunny weather. That promise is always kept. As one pulls into the station, all the sorry faces have brightened up, as fresh as plants finally able to photosynthesise.
The drive from Fabrègues (my hometown) to Lodève was the beginning of my encounter with the sculptor Paul Dardé. He grew up in the area, surrounded by the rugged beauty of the limestone plateau of the Larzac, discovering through working in the fields with his family, the raw materials he would come to use in his sculptures. He was, at heart, an autodidact: from a young age, he skived school, but would spend long hours in the local library, avidly reading Zola, Dante, and Shakespeare, whose characters would later inspire his work. In 1912, he moved to Paris to pursue his artistic education and career, and despite his sparse academic training (he briefly attended art school in Montpellier during his military service, he travelled for a month in Italy with a travel bursary, he was admitted to the Beaux-Arts in Paris but preferred visiting museums, and he spent a mere few days in Rodin’s workshop), he made a name for himself in the art world, thanks in part to the support of the art critic Armand Dayot.
Paul Dardé, Macbeth as a teenager, ca. 1927, plaster mould.
In 1920, his career truly blossomed with his four metre-high stone sculpture The Faun, for which he won the Prix national des arts. It was that same year he chose to leave Paris with his wife Alice Dardé, and returned to the South of France. Writing in 1927, he explained his decision by his desire for cultural decentralisation, and his love of his home region:
“In Paris there were much more lucrative jobs, without much material concern, and which would have been in keeping with what many people expected of me. They would even have been infinitely more enjoyable. But my ideal was quite different. [...] . My ideal was, for a long time, to return to [my native] region in order to truly implement artistic decentralisation; in order to learn the traditions of the stonemasonry trade, which I did not know. I wanted to study and defend the historical monuments there, to try to preserve those that still remained. In 1920, after the success, I did not want to devote my activity to serving Paris, its coteries, its pumps and its deeds. Paris did not need me! ... I preferred to come back among you, and work for the promotion of our beautiful region.”
Paul Dardé, The Faun, 1920, 4m, stone.
Leaving behind the noise and bustle of the capital, it is in the region of Lodève that he spent the rest of his life, working on commissions and, in the aftermath of the First World War, sculpting war memorials for the surrounding towns and villages. Ivonne Papin, who showed me around the museum’s collection, recommended I take a look at his commemorative sculpture for Lodève. It was a short walk from the museum.
Set in a park, between a parking place, a boulodrome, and the town hall, the sculpture depicts five women and two children surrounding the corpse of a soldier, who seems to have just fallen in combat. Sadness breathes from their stone faces. These women and children, huddled around the dead soldier, suggest the memorial speaks about grieving rather than heroism, about loss rather than victory, and about community rather than individuality.
Paul Dardé, Lodève war memorial, 1930.
As I stood there pondering what to make of this first visit, it struck me as particularly poignant to start a journey in Europe at a war memorial. They are strong reminders of what was, of what we want no more, but also of the worst of what has torn Europeans apart.
There are - thankfully - happier ties which bring us together. Art, for a start. I thought of Dardé’s busts: Don Quixotte, Macbeth, Ophelia, Wagner, Beethoven. They were all European, as much as national icons, werent’t they ? Didn’t he, like many artists of his time, travel in Italy, studying and copying from the traditional great masters who form the Western European canon ? Perhaps I shall follow, for a short while, in his footsteps… Time to leave home again.
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