Dear Mr Arno Breker...

The following is a translation of the speech given by Abel Bonnard, then National Cultural Education Minister of France to inaugurate the Arno Breker exhibition at the Musée National de l’Orangerie des Tuileries on May 15 1942.

Dear Mr Arno Breker,

At a time when I have the honor of representing the French Government to receive you, and when I have the joy of welcoming you on behalf of French artists, I know you well enough to be sure that you are as sensitive as I am to the nobility of the event that brings us together. We French, we look around you at the great gestures of your statues which speak the universal language of sculpture. You, German, you find yourself in this Paris that you know and that recognizes you. You spent your formational years here, working in our schools, frequenting our masters, from Rodin, who now lives on in glory, to Maillol and Despiau, who are still among us. Like us, you have tasted the charming air of Paris, you have had as witnesses of your days, as friends of your reflections, these benevolent monuments.

Who, from Place Vendôme to Place de la Concorde, from Les Invalides to Notre Dame, are so noble at the edge of life without wanting to be haughty above it. You have known here the intense work that is accomplished in solitude and the effervescent chatter of cafés, where those who have not been able to close in on a work scatter themselves in theories. You have felt all of the delicate influence of our climate, which poured so easily into the pleasure of life of the young artist who had woken up with the will to work. We can really call you Parisian, since it is in Paris that you have lived and those hours of wandering, which are sweet without being vain, for those at least who do not wander all the time, and those decisive hours of work and training where an artist distils in himself the personality that he will expand in his works.

Now you return to us with the most glorious legacy that a man of your order can have, that of his works. You reappear in the happiest and most satisfying state an artist can reach, when he expresses by the full play of his abilities and talents the aspirations of the people from whom he comes and the soul of his whole race. For the artist is a superior man without being an isolated man. Even though he does not see many men at his level, he feels below him the thrust of all his people, the effort of a multitude of which he is the zenith. Your work manifests the new Germany, where the strengthening of disciplines has resulted from the bringing together of hearts, where the strengthening of the hierarchy has had as a condition the overthrow of social barriers. It is a very significant thing that at the very moment when your country is devoting itself to a gigantic task, when the German armies are forming in the East the colossal dam which alone preserves Europe from a inundation of darkness, Germany, thus engaged with all her strength in action, does not abandon for a moment this activity superior to the action, which is that of the arts and which remains, in fact, necessary to the full expression of a great people, since it fixes the soul of a nation carried away by time in works that time will not carry away.

There is an example so full of meaning that I wish that it is understood by all the other countries, and first of all by mine. That France, among so many evils, does not allow herself to be diminished to the point of an awful materialism of defeat, that what she is undergoing does not take away from her the memory of what she is, and, far from abandoning herself, that on the contrary she devotes herself much more ardently than yesterday to those superior activities whose immaterial richness must flood our misery. Do we not still have outstanding artists to show to the world and do we not also have new things to say? Do we not have to express in works the fervor of this community that is established among us? From this hearth of souls must spring the ray of the arts. At the very moment when the food of the body is tightly measured, let us offer to all the French the only feast without measure, the meal of nectar and ambrosia which comforts men. Let France escape from all her material sufferings, let her give herself with more inspiration and impetus than ever to those arts which have made her glory. May she support with a bleeding arm the torch that never goes out.

Dear Mr. Breker, I told you, you are meeting us again. But in such a frank meeting, there must be no veil between us. After a war that many of us wanted to prevent, you find us in the unspeakable pain of our defeat. This defeat is like a gash on our face; it is a wound that makes our flesh cry out day and night. But we do not want this pain to paralyze our intelligence, nor do we want it to stifle our generosity. We do not want this deep pain to be bottomless, but on the contrary, we want to touch the bottom of it to rise up again immediately. We are ambitious, Mr. Breker. We want our country to find in the catastrophe in which it almost perished, the secret of revival. We want France to emerge from this eclipse with rays that she did not have before entering it, with a face truer, more dazzling and purer, more faithful to her genius, than at the moment when she was veiled by a fatal shadow. This genius is, above all, made of friendship. That is why I am happy to solemnly renew here the cultural relationship between our two countries. These relations have linked them continuously to each other for centuries for their mutual benefit, and it is only in recent times that they were interrupted by the conspiracy of evil forces that used France without thinking of her. In re-establishing them, we are only returning to what should always have been and what almost always has been. This plane of culture is for our two nations the place of an inexhaustible magnificence. Here it is not only the oppositions which disappear, it is the rivalry itself which disappears in the profusion of the exchanges and, like all the times that it is a question of a trade of great feelings, one cannot keep account any more nor evaluate with accuracy all that is given or received. The geniuses of the great peoples come together and seek each other out in the same opulent and fiery atmosphere that envelops the loves of the gods. Convinced that, in these exchanges, we have on both sides equally to gain, I confess to you that, for my part, I think only of what I take, without worrying about what I bring. To grow, to enrich oneself, to become what one was not and even what one did not believe one could be, this is the primary motive of any great culture. The essential thing for us, French and Germans, is to conceive that these cultural relations are the first ones that must be re-established between us, because they overcome all the obstacles that still stop the others. They are, from one people to the other, like the rainbow which seems to be the sublime outline of all the more material bridges that can be built on the earth below it.

Mr. Arno Breker, you are the sculptor of heroes. It is on this idea that I want to end on. The drama in which we find ourselves calls for heroes, but what constitutes heroism? The absolute gift of oneself is not enough. The hero is the man revealed not only in his superiority, but in his fullness. He is the one who intervenes with all his strength in a drama that his intellect has understood, the one through whom nations speak to destiny, the man who has as much light as heat, the man of generosity and intelligence, the one who has his feet in reality and his head in poetry. He would not be so powerful to change the world if he had not started by tuning into it. He is the envoy and the shining interpreter of the dark forces. He brings to men the very order that they desired, but would not have known how to give themselves without him. If, as I ardently hope, the age in which we are entering must be favorable to the production of heroes, it is because, everywhere, the people are going to return with all their mass into the life of nations. A hero could not spring from a fragmented society; he must result from a coherent society. He is the superior of a people of brothers. These heroes, Mr. Breker, you illustrate them in your works. You depict the effort of those who work and those who struggle. You give to the cities those sublime inhabitants of marble or bronze which are no less necessary to them than their vulgar inhabitants of flesh, because, while these come and go like passengers on the deck of a ship, the tall statues resemble the lookout standing in the mast and contemplate a horizon of centuries, whereas the men exist only in a horizon of days. It is you who erect, above the ephemeral passers-by, these imperishable forms which, like bodies animated by the circulation of their blood, will live forever by the effusion of light. But these statues are not only made to commemorate heroes, they must also call for them. Among all the distracted passers-by of the big cities, their gesture must move the adolescents who will dedicate themselves to the supreme tasks. Mr. Breker, we admire your works not only because of the talent that is manifested in them, but because they respond to a deep human need in the present drama. For they are works of greatness and, amidst all our sufferings and because of these sufferings which are trials, it depends on us to enter into an era of greatness.