Page 30 - Studio International - December 1972

the germ of his world. It was the surface — this dating of, for example, the Walking Man,2 an as yet undefined language of sculpture: which
differently great surface, variedly reflects Rodin's own uncertainty in the nature, however he could only define for himself in
accentuated, accurately measured, out of the status, of the sculpture. It, like the Flying terms of the conventions, however degraded, of
which everything must rise — which was from Figure, the large Head of Isis and other pieces nineteenth-century sculpture: of the ambitions
this moment the subject-matter of his art . . . . now much admired, had no place in the public of Michelangelo and Donatello, of the ideas
His art was not built upon a great idea, but repertoire of the sculpture of the time: they that informed the late-Romantic literature of the
upon a minute, conscientious realization, were the by-product of public commissions, period, naturalism and symbolism. When
upon the attainable, upon a craft'. The Man but were only publicly exhibited, if at all in talking about his own work, Rodin evades the
with the Broken Nose embodies the core of Rodin's lifetime, years after their making. Their inherent inconsistencies and contradictions of
his originality before his exposure to home was in his studio, which became over the his stance by continual reference to 'nature' as
Michelangelo and Donatello or any possible years an alternative public 'theatre' in which the touchstone of truth and objectivity in his
awareness of what was happening in painting. new work could be appraised by a more informed sculpture, relating him to those artists in the
'There were no symmetrical planes in this and more sympathetic audience than the Salon past, not only Michelangelo, but also the
face at all, nothing repeated itself, no spot and thus the 'general public' could provide. In Gothic carvers and recent French sculptors
remained empty, dumb or indifferent'.1 the conditions of the studio, the work in such as Houdon and Barye whom he admired.
progress, the unfinished, the fragmentary, For Rodin this was possibly the only available
engaged the spectator's attention, and tradition he could construct for himself: but we
In spite of the purity and intensity of plastic conformed to the advanced taste of the time. should beware of taking the moral overtones of
purpose first noted by Rilke, it is rather the Under pressure from this taste, one suspects, an avowed attachment to the figure too literally,
distractions, the incoherence, the Rodin arbitrarily claimed as complete, and had certainly today. Rodin had no choice but to use
over-statement of Rodin's work, taken as a cast, those pieces which now seem 'modern'. the figure, as Elsen has pointed out :3 it was not
whole, that must strike us today. It is heavy By comparison with this duplication of the fact that he used it, but the way in which he
with the nineteenth century, in contrast to the objectives, the sculpture of Daumier and Degas used it that is crucial. And here Rodin's
stripped and private commitment of Degas in has a definition and a clarity, but it is a borrowed professed intentions and the physical results
sculpture, which grew in solitude and clarity. Their ambition to make sculpture came part company: Rodin's devotion to 'nature', to
obscurity, as Rodin's grew in public, during out of a tendency in their work in two-dimension truth in representation, results paradoxically in
exactly the same period — the quarter-century which increasingly called for a sculptural an increasing tendency towards abstraction,
from 1880. realization. They effectively use the language of both because of the character of the medium
It is too easy to explain away the prolixity and painting to define the role of sculpture. When and the expressive possibilities of shape and
diversity of Rodin's work and the confusions of the sculptor Rosso allowed this to happen, structure consistent with it.
his conception of the role of sculpture by comparison with Rodin illuminates the poverty I have already sketched out a view of Rodin4
looking back to four centuries of neglect, and of his ambition, lacking the carried-over drive in an earlier essay on Brancusi which made of
assuming that he somehow felt obliged to make from the field of painting where standards him the great protagonist of modelling, using a
up lost ground, by re-invigorating all the were much higher. method, and arriving at configurations
conventional modes of sculpture that had The problem is coming to look like this: characteristic of soft material, clay, as opposed
atrophied or fallen into decadence. Daumier, expectations of originality in sculpture were to Brancusi, who was pictured as the prototype
Degas and Medardo Rosso found no difficulty and still are conditioned by our experience of carver, the reducer of hard material, stone and
in concentrating the aims and sharpening the painting, not surprisingly since it has been the wood, and of bronze conceived as a carving
focus of sculpture in the nineteenth century. Nor dominant art since the Renaissance. Rodin material. Construction, for example in the
will it do to lift out isolated works from the resisted these expectations by reaching out for work of David Smith, was seen as a synthesis of
oeuvre, such as, notoriously, The Walking Man, these polarities, in a new material, steel, the
the fragmented figures of 1890-91, the late St John the Baptist 1878-80 properties of which demanded a wholly new
Bronze, 79 X 21 3/4 X 38 1/2 in.
Dancers, and on the basis of hindsight and approach to material on the part of the
Tate Gallery, London
recent taste, proclaim Rodin's modernity in the sculptor: its resistance to gravity consisting in its
face of the evidence of the mass of the work. tensile strength rather than its mass, the creative
It is a partial answer to say that in view of the process was thus more closely aligned with
economics of sculpture, an artist of Rodin's 'making' in the sense of fabrication, of the
ambition had no alternative but to work through making of tables and chairs and use objects, but
the existent system of the Salon and public also of making in the other arts, for example
commissions. Yet having started on this path, poetry and music .This view now seems to me
why did Rodin stick to it? After the State over-simple, and with regard to Rodin as
purchase of the John the Baptist and the partial and selective as others I have strongly
commission for the Gates of Hell, he had criticized. I am now no longer satisfied to
effectively gained an independence for a radical locate the beginning of construction in Cubism,
sculpture on a large scale without reference to where no doubt it was isolated and dramatized
public or academic convention; yet the by Picasso. It is implicit not only in Matisse's
Burghers of Calais, the Victor Hugo, the Balzac, sculpture from The Serf onwards, and in
and the other variously unrealized and frustrated Brancusi's first independent sculptures
public commissions, to say nothing of the (1907-8), but much earlier in Rodin, from the
portrait busts and the quantity of Cupid and start of the Gates of Hell, or before if the
Psyches and other Salon subjects, must indicate a Walking Man was made earlier. It is in Rodin's
continuing commitment to the conventions of stance from the beginning as an independent
nineteenth-century sculpture that far exceeds a artist, in his attitude towards his work — in both
nod in their direction. Rodin was dependent on, senses, as object and as process — that one must
and continued to align his intentions towards, look for evidence of this fundamental modernity.
and measured his ambitions against these There is an objectivity, a practicality, about the
norms: the uncertainties which surround the way in which Rodin set about making sculpture,