Louis DEJEAN Paris, 1872 - 1953 Les Passions s'élevant vers les muses, Pilasters for the decoration of the library of M. Charles Paix-Séailles Pair of original plaster casts retouched with clay and patinated on a wooden core Signed 'Louis Dejean' at the bottom Height: 101 cm (Restorations) Passions rising to the muses, original plasters, a pair, signed, by L.Dejean H. 39.16 in. Origin : Probably from the collection of Mr Charles Paix-Séailles (1879 - 1921) ; Private collection, Paris Exhibitions : Probably XIe exposition de la Société Nouvelle des Peintres et Sculpteurs sous la présidence d'Auguste Rodin, Paris, Galerie Georges-Petit, 15-30 March 1910, probably cat. no. 39: "Pilastre: Les passions - Fragments décoratifs pour une bibliothèque (pour être exécuté en bze) (app. à M. C. P.-S.)". Probably Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-arts, Paris, 1910, probably cat. no. 1788: "Décoration pour une bibliothèque (pilastre)" and no. 1789: "Les Passions" (fragment), belongs to M. C. P.-S.". Bibliography : related : Léandre Vaillat, "L'art décoratif: Louis Dejean", L'art et les artistes, March 1910, pp. 269-274. Commentary: "Very recently, Mr Dejean designed a whole sculptural ensemble to decorate a library. In this case, it was a piece of furniture with three sections, topped by a pediment. The first thing to do was to come up with an ornamental idea appropriate to the purpose of the object. Since books were involved, Mr Dejean naturally thought of the triumph of spirit over matter. How to translate this abstraction into plastic form? The Muses would be arranged on the pediment, around Apollo, and from right to left we would see Music, Comedy, Tragedy, Astronomy and Eloquence, expressing through gesture, drapery, costume or the absence of costume, the synthesis of their aspirations, but always in an original and new way, in no way reminiscent of workshop recipes. On the uprights, the Passions, naked women, emerging from the material like a crude sketch, then embraced, grouped, knotting their bodies into garlands and becoming less heavy, more slender, uncover their faces, which they had hitherto shamefully hidden, as they approached their divine sisters[1]". This is how the critic Léandre Vaillat deciphers the singular iconography of our two rare original plasters by Louis Dejean, whose later bronze editions were destined to decorate the library of the famous industrialist and publicist Charles Paix-Séailles (1879-1921). The sculptor worked on this project from 1907 onwards, presenting two plaster capitals for the same ensemble at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-arts that same year. Presumably exhibited in 1910, first at the Société Nouvelle and then at the Nationale, our pilasters, which have the particularity of having been reworked from time to time in terracotta and then given a patina by the artist, reflect the still-prevalent influence of Auguste Rodin on his former pupil and practitioner, so much so that the sensual modelling of the entangled bodies exhibited by the Passions seems directly reminiscent of the panels of La Porte de l'Enfer. Nevertheless, the greater attention paid here to a certain architectural balance tends to underline Dejean's own genius, "steeped in grace and tenderness"[2], as François Monod put it at the time. [1] Léandre Vaillat, "L'art décoratif: Louis Dejean", L'art et les artistes, March 1910, p. 274. [2] François Monod, "Le Mois artistique, le Salon de la Société Nationale", L'art et les artistes, April 1910, p. 130.