Counterpoint: Anthony Guerrée Moves Among Bourdelle's Plasters

The Musée Bourdelle is, in ordinary times, already one of the loveliest addresses in Paris: the sculptor's studio, his apartments and his garden, preserved in the 15th arrondissement among the surrounding buildings. From 8 to 27 September, the designer Anthony Guerrée installs Contrepoint there, in the midst of the permanent collections.

The principle

A counterpoint, in music, is a melodic line added to another without covering it: the two are heard at once and each remains legible. That is precisely the programme of the installation. Guerrée takes from Antoine Bourdelle's sculptures what interests him — the lines, the curves, the tensions — and transposes it into four materials: wood, glass, textile and clay. The pieces slip in among the works without ever taking their place.

What you see, room by room

In the grand hall, four screens of stained glass and wood unfold their play of coloured light around the sculptures. It is the showpiece of the installation, and the only one that alters the light of the place rather than adding to it.

The hall of plasters gives way to mixed clay: surfaces and modules in terracotta, but also moulds and matrices, set on Bourdelle's own worktable. To show the tool beside the work, in a sculptor's studio, is a designer's gesture more than a scenographer's. The presentation continues into the inner garden.

In the more intimate drawing room, a daybed upholstered in a jacquard designed for the occasion, drawn from Bourdelle's repertoire of forms: the translation of a volume into a surface. Beside it, a few small pieces of furniture, among them a revolving bookcase.

Who is Anthony Guerrée

Trained at the École Boulle, he passed through Studio Andrée Putman and then Christophe Delcourt before founding his own studio in 2020. He has already worked in a heritage setting of this kind: the Fondation Le Corbusier had invited him to the Maison La Roche for an earlier Design Week. It is a rare practice — that of a designer who produces for an existing place rather than for a catalogue.

What the museum already holds

The installation resonates with a collection few visitors know: thanks to the bequest of Rhodia Dufet-Bourdelle in 2002, the museum holds sets of furniture and the archives of Michel Dufet, an emblematic Art Deco designer — and Antoine Bourdelle's son-in-law, whose work he championed. The dialogue between design and sculpture is not, then, an exhibition idea: it has been in the walls for twenty years.

What is editioned, what is unique

The press pack settles the matter. The Orbe daybed is a piece produced by La Chance, the house founded by Louise Breguet and Jean-Baptiste Souletie; it is shown here in a version upholstered specially for the installation, with a jacquard woven by the Tissages de Charlieu, a centuries-old workshop in the Loire, with the technical support of Isabelle Arnadie. The Forma revolving bookcase, previously unseen, belongs to the same publisher.

The stained-glass screens, by contrast, are unique pieces made for the place: the glass by Sophie Toporkoff, whose studio accompanies artists and designers on bespoke projects, and the solid ash structures by the joiner Louis Monier, Meilleur Ouvrier de France. The terracottas — vases, catch-alls, free forms, Voluto podiums — come from research into mixed clay carried out with the Italian manufactory Fornace Brioni, founded in 1920 and now in its fourth generation: these are research objects, not yet products.

Guerrée sums up his way of working in a single phrase, speaking of his first collection, Les assises du temps perdu, inspired by Proust's characters: « I like the idea of designing collections the way one writes stories. » One of these seats entered the Mobilier national in 2022.

Getting there

Musée Bourdelle — 18 rue Antoine-Bourdelle, 75015 Paris. Contrepoint, from 8 to 27 September 2026, in the galleries of the permanent collections. Tuesday to Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., last entry at 5.15 p.m. Free admission to the permanent collections. It is the museum's first collaboration with Paris Design Week.

The Beyit gesture: photograph a piece from the installation and scan it — the tool tells you what is editioned, where to find it, and what exists only here.