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Concept
Charles Cordier
Summary
Charles Henri Joseph Cordier (19 October 1827 - 30 May 1905) was a French sculptor of ethnographic subjects. He is known for his polychrome sculptures in the later realist phase of Orientalism.
Cordier was born in Cambrai, North of Paris in 1827.
In 1847, a meeting with Seïd Enkess, a former black slave who had become a model, determined the course of his career.
His first success was a bust in plaster of a Sudanese man "Saïd Abdullah of the Mayac, Kingdom of the Darfur" (Sudan), exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1848, the same year that slavery was abolished in all French colonies. It is now housed at The Walters Art Museum. In 1851, Queen Victoria bought a bronze of it at the Great Exhibition of London.
In 1851 he created “Bust of an African Woman" renamed "African Venus" by Théophile Gautier.
From 1851 to 1866, Cordier served as the official sculptor of Paris' National Museum of Natural History. During this time, he traveled abroad, and conceived a project to sculpt a series of ethnic types, spectacularly lifelike busts for their new ethnographic gallery. (now housed in the Musee de l'Homme, Paris).
In 1856, he traveled to Algeria, discovered onyx deposits in then reopened ancient quarries and began to use the stone in busts.
Cordier also depicted European types from different parts of France, Greece and Italy. His artistic credo was however in conscious opposition to the largely Eurocentric viewpoint prevailing in his day.
In 1860 Cordier became a member of the Society of Anthropology of Paris, founded by Paul Broca in 1859.
In 1862, addressing the French Society of Anthropology, Cordier stated:
"Beauty does not belong to a single, privileged race. I have promoted throughout the world of art the idea that beauty is everywhere. Every race has its own beauty, which differs from that of others. The most beautiful black person is not the one who looks most like us."
("Le beau n'est pas propre à une race privilégiée, j'ai émis dans le monde artistique l'idée de l'ubiquité du beau. Toute race a sa beauté qui diffère de celle des autres races.
Official source
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