Charles Auffret (1929-2001), Sculptures Dessins Aquarelles, Château de Blois, 31 mars – 16 avril 1979

“No creation is a work of art if it doesn’t contribute to humanizing us.” Berenson

If you want to go deeply into the art of a master, you have to start with his drawings and constantly go back to them. It’s through drawing that the artist elaborates his concept of form, and it’s through its expression that he reveals himself most completely.

Drawing immediately lays bare the weaknesses of a poser or the precision and originality of an authentic creator. In a drawing exhibition, the pure ones always emerge victorious, while the “others,” as Ségonzac used to say, never even attempt it, except in cases of extreme vanity.

And while drawing is the basis of the art of painting or statuary, it is, for the collector and the art historian, the foundation of knowledge; it’s through the study of drawing that connoisseurs are formed. In the time before audio-visual took over the power of the image, people of taste, the “curious” of the classical age, liked to gather to admire drawings and engravings together. The culture of a man of quality was measured as much by his portfolios as by his library. No language, not even that of Letters, imposed its predominance to the detriment of others. 

For drawing is not only the artist’s alphabet, the elements of a language without which he cannot express anything worthwhile, but it is above all, through its daily practice, a privileged means of expression, the one that the accomplished artist most frequently turns to, whether it’s to express an emotion evoked by the landscape in front of him or to work out the details of a project’s composition. For instance, by studying his drawings, we can see how Rodin’s Burghers of Calais, that epitome of modern French statuary, came together in his mind.

In short, drawing is the language by which the artist can say all that he feels, all that he dreams, with a great sobriety of means. It allows him to directly express the emotion raised by the tenderness of flesh, and the way in which he perceives the world in all its chance and mystery. Through the life of his drawings, we measure the power of his imagination, just as we measure his sincerity through their frank, sometimes even naïve turns, for drawing is a science of the heart as much as of the hand.

The great masters have always cherished drawing. And though they may never have intended to show their preparatory drawings, their “manuscripts”—to which we, valuing their spontaneity, are perhaps too attached today—they were always careful to keep their most polished ones, the ones that reveal their most sensitive thoughts. Claude Lorrain, Fragonard, and Corot gave drawing a privileged place throughout their lives. 

Charles Auffret is one of the leading representatives of French contemporary statuary, and his drawings have all the virtues that one expects of the drawings of masters. He has developed every aspect of this art to a superlative degree: the knowledge of technique, a sense of the composition of the page, an intuition for form and motion. But all that would be nothing if it weren’t accompanied by something much rarer: an irrepressible zest for life, through which he attains a fullness and grace.

Charles Auffret always very carefully arranges the composition of his drawings. His figures follow an axis that keeps them in balance, strongly emphasizing the movement that he seeks through foreshortenings and amplifications. To “amplify sensation,” as Delacroix recommended, he often constructs his drawings according to a diagonal that divides the paper in the direction of its greatest dimension. In this way, in the heart of a defined surface, he unleashes a new depth, a truly artistic space that allows him to give his drawings a maximum amplitude. 

Charles Auffret is a sensitive and thoughtful connoisseur of the medieval statuary, and the apparent life of his figures is based on the great Roman and Gothic effigies. In many of his drawings of women, he handles the most subtle aspect of the composition, its monumentality, not through the dimensions of the figures, but through their proportions. The calm, the serenity, that emanates from these women gives them the nobility of figures from cathedrals and certain busts by Cézanne. 

You can look at every one of Auffret’s drawings for a long time and then come back to it as to a pure source: monumentality is always aligned with the freshness of original feeling, which he knew how to transpose and preserve. Without any single line being solely responsible, we are constantly reminded of the sculptor used to obeying the law of the plumb-line in the clarity of his compositions.

It’s in his reclining figures, those in which there’s no activity to convey an anecdotal effervescence, that you can get the best idea of what the form in motion means to Auffret. No matter what study you choose—a reclining nude traced in pen, a large red chalk of a seated woman … you’ll see how the secret disalignment of the volumes creates the impression of movement.

This intuition for a lack of alignment, this science of aesthetic relationships that progress without accumulation, is the undeniable sign, the sacred seal, by which all the masters can be recognized. By closely observing how he develops each of his drawings, you can understand without needing any explanation, how Charles Auffret takes his place among them.

This disalignment can be imperceptible, as in the art of the masters of the Quattro-cento or, closer to us, in the compositions of Puvis de Chavannes, who so admired Gauguin and Degas. Or, on the other hand, it can be impetuous and violent, as with Géricault or Rodin: it is always the sign of a dynamic conception of the form, what is normally expressed by saying that a drawing is “alive.” 

All the rest is mannerism—arbitrary, and powerless.

The arabesque of a leg, the protuberance of a knee, the folding of an arm under a head inspired Charles Auffret to sudden exuberances that revealed the truly unpredictable depth of his concept of form. His art of disalignment went hand in hand with his sense of amplification. Like a heavy fruit full of juice and light that surprises us at the end of winter by its superb and precocious ripening, the part of the body closest to our eyes seems to burst open, blossom, and take on a new density.

From one drawing to the next, Auffret varies his choice of materials. Reconnecting with a technique abandoned since the Renaissance, he might trace his figures in silver lead on papers that he has tinted himself. The acuity of the point and the lightness of the rubbing respond to his need for delicacy. Equally, his emotion, in touch with his model, might find an appropriate vehicle in red chalk, which allows him to render motion and the value of flesh. And he also often resorts to the pen. From instinct, he allies the density of his lines with the rhythm of his hashmarks. Sometimes an imperceptibly graduated wash separates areas of light and shadow on a torso or a face. No matter what medium he uses, his work translates a subtle harmony between reserve and desire; each sign unveils it, unwilingly. His drawings have no other master than nature.

An exacting sculptor, Charles Auffret pursued the mystery of form in the great works of western statuary. For many years, every morning, he drew from live models, and he continues to do so to this day.

A day will come when the drawings of Charles Despiau (1874-1946), Charles Malfray (1887-1940), and Jean Carton will be presented following the wonderful works of Rodin and Maillol in the drawing departments of important public collections—on that day, Charles Auffret will be among them.

Charles Auffret was first and is always foremost a sculptor. A native of Dijon, in Burgundy, the land of sculpture par excellence, he turned while still an adolescent to the Gothic masters and to Rude’s powerful œuvre, and thus his vocation came, from the beginning, out of the discovery of an art of serenity and spirit.

Through his appetite for truth, his taste for full and free forms, and the choice of his themes, he is directly linked to the school of modern sculpture that grew out of Degas and Despiau. It is at the heart of this independent French tradition that he has chosen to develop the full potential of his personality. 

That said, his art, in all its irreducibility, is uniquely his own.

Sensitive to the aesthetic mystery of women, Charles Auffret likes to work with them in very free poses—seated, drying a foot; bent forward like a superb and supple plant; or pregnant, listening to the one growing and already moving within her. While respecting the body’s natural equilibrium, he highlighted the elasticity of its movements. At the same time, moved by the latent fullness of its forms, he was interested in translating their carnal radiation without losing the sense of their purity.

From one work to another, he varied the expression of movement. Here, the accent is more on tension, there, on fulfillment and repose. In certain figures, such as Gabrielle, he sought the spontaneity of the sketch to create the sensation of intense, almost wild, life. Everywhere on the bronze, we find the imprint of the thumb. If he was able to maintain the vibrancy of the sketch, it’s above all because his architecture is perfect. From his study of the masters, Auffret, in fact, inherited the most abstract element of their science: that of structure.

If his works were done in stone, they would make great sculptures for public gardens—they have all the required qualities, lacking neither the scale nor the spirit. They’re only awaiting a “public sponsor,” an enlightened statesman, for sculpture, much more than painting, because of the investment it requires, can only receive the support it needs from public authorities.

Through this kind of work, Charles Auffret participates in reinvigorating the great artistic myths as they’ve been embodied in stone and bronze by masters of western sculpture since the Greeks. 

But to the most basic of these myths, that of youth, he has given a modern, intimate, radiant image, free of all hieratic and domineering references. A distinct state of grace mingles with a simplicity that generously opens out into the light, reflecting a spring that is constantly reborn. For the artist, with his avid interest in the mystery of nature, each work revives the god Pan.

Alongside the theme of the woman, Charles Auffret has chosen to explore another domain that most sculptors have not yet entered. Children and grandchildren are his favorite subjects. A sensitive artist with a great reservoir of resources, he loves their natural aspect, their availability. They awaken gradually to the things of this world, and this never ceases to move him. With them, he works in peace, with no fear of being bothered by the sort of impatience that adult models so often show. On one vacation, for example, he chose an infant, Jean-Marie, for his model, with his round head wrapped in shawls; on another occasion, he portrayed a child of about the same age seated and looking like a "little Buddha."

In his bronze work, Charles Auffret translates these early months of life, so full of daze and wonder, with tremendous sincerity and through true statuary alone, using no sentimentality, no anecdote, and no symbolism. He communicates his emotions through the language of form, plane, modeling, and light alone. As an authentic sculptor, he expresses his vision only through concrete means.

He begins by studying his subject at leisure, observing the child, whether sitting, standing, crawling, or frolicking about. Pencil in hand, he gradually explores the morphology of his face and penetrates his small mind. “I watch him play,” he says, “and I learn him by heart.” Finally, the mental image formed, he grasps his challenge. And like his great predecessors, Auffret works partly from memory, through dynamic synthesis, to create a single figure of the various contours and successive angles through which the child revealed himself. If he looks further, it’s to revisit his feelings and confirm his certainties. He pursues this work for months. If, along the way, he feels that he’s gotten lost, he destroys his early versions and starts again from scratch. From then on, he has only one goal in mind: to move toward a finished work without betraying his original emotion.

Auffret also works from memory with his large figures, but in those cases, he adds progressive studies in plaster to his drawings. By comparing the final bronze with the earlier versions, we can better understand the “gestation” of the work, for we almost have to speak of it with a language of childbirth. According to Nietzsche, all great artists are “tireless not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, modifying, and arranging.” 

The secret of great statuary rests in a harmony of memory and feeling; therein lies the mystery of every work that’s truly alive. Nature, for the real artist, is more than a support, and memory is more than a resource. The one awakens sensation, and the other transfigures and rediscovers it. It is the poet's self, his singular, rebellious, unconscious truth, that he relentlessly pursues throughout his work, and he’s on the lookout for its muffled echoes through all his efforts. More than a superficial and arbitrary resemblance, statuary seeks a buried truth. When the clay or marble image coincides with the inner image, when the material appearance becomes one with the truth of the spirit, the work is complete.

All that’s left to do is to mold, cast, and chisel it.

Charles Auffret supervises all these operations with the greatest care. As a maker of statuary, he enlists the best artisans in the field while yet remaining the master of the work.

According to the masters, a beautiful cast is always light—pure in its body and fine in its casting, it must remain faithful to the original plaster, respecting the sequence of planes and their modeling. Auffret paid close attention to the quality of his casts. The work may be out of his hands, but not beyond his responsibility. When a work does not meet his standards, he asks the founder to recast it. He knew that Rodin, vigilant and inflexible, did the same. This made him feared by some men working in the field who had become less and less used to such demands. 

He alone chooses his patinas in light of the artistic meaning of the work. Imperfect, he redoes them; too intense, he lightens them. Over the years, he has supervised their evolution. He wanted silvered casts of certain bronzes of young girls in order to highlight the fresh, almost luminous aspect of the image, while for others, he chose a green or aubergine patina more in harmony with the spirit of the figure. For, like the horns heard in some romantic operas, a bronze has indefinable resonances that the patina underscores, amplifies, and prolongs.

In his studio, Charles Auffret is surrounded by certain models, the choice of which amounts to a confession, and he never ceases questioning them like so many mysteries: a large Tang horse, the frieze from a temple at Delphi, the head of a Gothic king, and a Florentine adolescent next to a reproduction of a Rembrandt. Here, a plaster after Despiau, there, bronzes by Malfray and Osouf reveal some of his preferences among the contemporary. We open neither his boxes nor his closets.

All these works, and above all, the most recent ones, constitute a veritable profession of faith. They mark Auffret’s predilection for great French statuary, even if its innovative elements are still disputed and misunderstood. But he loves this art to the point of being able to forget it when he becomes a creator, for an artist only continues a tradition when he renews it, when its truth is not the truth of another.

It’s in the silence of his studio, far from the agitations of the world, there where he comes every morning to return to the pursuit of his creation that an artist most completely unveils what he carries within him. Not by what he says, but by what he makes.

Sometimes, through an exhibition, he invites us in his own way to push open his studio doors.

If his work, the sensitive and fragile hypothesis regarding the meaning of the world, which he puts before us, attains the power of proof, it’s because, in seeing it, we have experienced a new and enlivening feeling.

Through the secret language of forms, the artist shares his purest emotions of happiness, suffering, and amazement.

Look well at the work of Charles Auffret; like the stones of cathedrals through which the words of the prophets have passed, the breath of the spirit passes through each one of his figures, the breath of truths that never die.