Léon-Ernest Drivier

The following information is provided courtesy of John Zarobell, Assistant Curator, Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Rodin Museum:

Léon-Ernest Drivier (1878-1951) was one of the most prominent sculptors in Paris during the years between the two world wars. His art, distinct from both the rarefied elegance of academic sculpture and the radical experiments of the avant-garde, sought a middle ground through a return to the fundamental principles of classical statuary. In this respect, his work is part of a broader movement in French sculpture of the period pursued by other artists such as Antoine Bourdelle and Auguste Maillol. This group, termed the “Independents” because they founded the Salon des Indépendents in 1923, championed a revival of the structural principals of sculptural form, a “rapelle à l’ordre” which echoed the turn by artists such as Pablo Picasso and Jules Laurens to harmonious and solid forms derived from classical models.

Like many sculptors of his era, Drivier’s career trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. As a young man, his incredible draughtsmanship impressed his teachers and the city of Grenoble gave him a fellowship to attend the Academy in Paris. After a number of years of rigorous study under the tutelage of Louis-Ernest Barrias, Drivier tired of the constraints of this life and appealed to Auguste Rodin to take him on as a studio assistant. Rodin assented and Drivier entered the master’s studio in 1900. At this time Rodin was quite famous and productive and he employed some forty assistants. Rodin must have been impressed by Drivier’s talents because he was one of the assistants given the most difficult and important task in the atelier, carving marbles for private commissions from clay models which would then be finished by the master’s hand. Working in this milieu, Drivier absorbed the lessons of Rodin’s art and came to understand the importance of dynamism and of personal expression in sculpture. Looking back on his life forty years later, Drivier recalled Rodin warning him “Never trust flat. Volume must come first in sculpture" (Jacques Baschet, Sculptuers de ce temps (Paris, 1946), n.p.).

Drivier benefited from the period he spent in Rodin’s studio and, like other studio assistants who worked for Rodin, he struggled to find his own expressive language for his own art. He was aided by interactions with other young sculptors who worked with him. “The Schnegg Band,” named after the brothers Lucien and Gaston Schnegg--two of Rodin’s principal assistants--was a loosely affiliated group of sculptors who sought to break away from the emotional extremes of Rodin’s figurative sculpture and to return to the relative austerity of classical Greek statuary. Drivier was a member of this group, along with Charles Despiau, Antoine Bourdelle and Albert Marque, among others. The leader of this movement, Lucien Schnegg, died prematurely in 1909. His portrait busts attest to his incredible sensitivity and his mastery of the structural principles of modeling. It is a rich irony that the sculptors who carved Rodin’s marbles from plaster or clay models developed, in their turn, an interest in direct modeling (carving directly into the stone) which their master never attempted. Further, in direct opposition to Rodin’s prominent interest in gesture as expressed through hands and facial features, this group of young artists nurtured a taste for simplicity and structure in sculptural form, to the point of removing the appendages and even the heads of figures.