MAURICE GUIRAUD-RIVIERE (born 1881) Biography

Description / Expertise

Nijinsky?s performance in the revolutionary ballet, l?Après-Midi d?un faune changed dance technique for ever. Diaghelev?s ballet, based a poem written by Stéphane Mallarmé with music by Claude Debussy and costumes by Léon Bakst, was the first choreographic creation of the young and talented dancer. On the first night, at the Châtelet on the 29th May 1912, the final bow was greeted by a stunned silence from the audience, immediately followed by shouts of bis (encore). Diaghelev instantaneously ordered a second performance after which Rodin rushed to the stage to congratulate Nijinsky. The following day brought an inflammatory review in Le Figaro, written by its owner, Gaston Calmette: We saw an indecent faun making rapid movements of erotic bestiality and shameless gestures. This suggestive pantomime from the body of a deformed beast, hideous of face and even more hideous in profile was justifiably greeted by whistles. Odilon Redon?s and Auguste Rodin?s rebuttal appeared the next day in Roger Marx?s column on the front page of Le Matin, which resulted in Nijinsky sitting for Rodin .

Jean Cocteau, friend and fellow artist of Diaghelev and his androgynous and bisexual lover, Nijinsky, drew the dancer in profile that year. These powerful pen and ink drawings show the primordial pointed-eared faun stretching his neck toward the stirring vision of the nymphs . Guiraud-Rivière?s potent bronze echoes the facial expression of this primitive beast, in direct contrast to his pendant portrait head of the dancer as Le Spectre de la Rose in the same year.

Maurice Guiraud-Rivière studied sculpture at the Paris Ecole des Beaux-Arts and exhibited at the Salon des Artistes and the Salon des Humouristes. His subjects: dancers, athletes and horses are usually theatrical and captured in motion.