Page 31 - Studio International - December 1972

that clearly marks him off from his academic ambitious figure sculptures, thejohn the
predecessors and contemporaries. This Baptist (1878), the Call to Arms (I878), and
workmanlike attitude to art is well demonstratec Adam (1880), are by comparison with the Age of
by his advice to Rilke - 'Why don't you just go Bronze vulgar, overstated and confused, and
and look at something - for example an animal give some indication of the impasse in which
in the Jardin des Plantes, and keep on looking at Rodin now found himself. He could move
it till you're able to make a poem of it ?'5 Rilke towards the frankly naturalistic, eliminating
rightly connected Rodin with Cezanne in this what remained of the graceful and idealized in
respect, the two great 'workers' whose the pose and proportions of the Age of Bronze, in
continuous labour and application made favour of the rugged musculative and
possible the great harvest of the modern era. illusioned movement of the John the Baptist;
The Age of Bronze is Rodin's prime increase the freedom and vitality of modelling,
declaration. Its discovered, worked-for but violate the principle of the identity of the
simplicity, balance and clarity, challenged the sculpture with the figure, as in the Call to Arms;
Salon sculptors on their own ground; though or move wholly into the Michelangelesque,
these were qualities Rodin was subsequently to with the mannered and contorted Adam.
disown, the sculpture still retains a freshness Rodin dealt with what he clearly felt to be
and an authority that depends on its unresolved in these three sculptures in quite
containment of structure and understatement of different ways, which separately bear witness
handling. I still find it more moving than any to his practicality, the 'making' nature of his
other sculpture of Rodin's, although it is effort. The vastly differing nature of these
superficially uncharacteristic of what one must three pieces is due to his unconcealed
recognize as the major direction of the oeuvre. dependence on his model, whether in art or
But even without any knowledge of the nature. The John the Baptist is by Rodin's own
circumstances in which it was first made and The Age of Bronze 1875-6 explanation derived from a pose spontaneously
shown, it carries the urgency of the first Bronze, 71 1/4 x 23 1/2 x 23 1/2 in. taken up by the model, the Call to Arms from
statement in a new language, based on two Tate Gallery, London Rude's Marseillaise and Michelangelo's Pieta,
fundamental propositions :- (I) The sculptor the Adam from the Pieta and the Sistine
takes responsibility for every aspect of the work, its the Age of Bronze on eyes habituated to such Creation of Man. But this dependence is
conception, its form, its size, its material, its figures as Gibson's Tinted Venus (itself equalled by Rodin's respect for what he had
finish, its relation to the spectator. (2) The considered daring in its time) must have been made as component, the made sculpture
structure of the sculpture is identified with the tremendous. Here was a sculpture stripped becoming both subject and source. Thus the
structure of the figure. down to its essentials - no accessories, no distraction of the overly-detailed, 'story-telling'
The first proposition I have already touched ornament, no detail, no story, no message. The head and arms are removed from the John the
on. Rodin's lifelong commitment to clay sculpture is the figure, the figure is the Baptist to focus on the illusion of the striding
signalled a total responsibility for the work at sculpture - Rodin was simultaneously accused c legs: and even the torso has been replaced, with
every stage, in contrast to the prevailing use of making a sketch rather than a finished the line of juncture frankly exposed.
marble by academic sculptors, who thus not sculpture, and of casting from life. The Abstraction is thus achieved by reduction of the
only abandoned responsibility for the contradictory character of these charges outer limits of the figure. In the case of the
conception of the work, in terms of a prescribed indicate that Rodin had achieved a new and far Adam, Rodin abstracts by repetition,
limitation on subject and form, but also for the higher order of naturalism, in terms of an arranging three casts of a modified Adam as the
final product which the artist very likely never illusion of reality, of the living model, with a Three Shades in a horizontal sequence on top of
touched, the transcription into marble being sculpture whose surface is, in academic terms the Gates of Hell. The absurd proportions and
carried out by assistants. The 'sculptor's' role 'unfinished'. Every aspect of the figure is in fact structure of the individual figures are
in this process was analogous to that of a modern invented, thought-out new. Rodin subserved as elements of an intricate and
film director. Academic sculpture by the 187os deliberately rejected the previous 350 years of powerful design. The frankness of the use of
had in effect become an industry, Western sculpture in choosing Michelangelo's repetition is unequalled until Brancusi's
commercialized and mechanized to a Bound Slave as a model for the pose: and his Endless Column. The Call to Arms, though no
remarkable extent. The sheer quantity of development of the pose in the Age of Bronze doubt a challenge to the symmetrically heaped,
sculpture produced in the nineteenth century, exposes the flat, languid and unconvincing closed pyramid of the academic public
the degree of craftsmanship, the advances in character of the original. But it is the unity of monuments, in its vital asymmetry, top-
production methods, were in inverse proportion structure with surface that distinguishes the heaviness and aggressive penetration of space,
to creativity, to artistic quality. If one Age of Bronze from any earlier sculpture: every nonetheless shared with them, exposed even, the
sculpture could be said to have reversed this inch of the surface is considered, worked-on, unconvincing convention - of a 'pile' of
situation, to have reclaimed responsibility for invented, every inch is equally and differently vertical figures. The horizontal alignment of the
sculpture for sculptors, it is the Age of Bronze. expressive: expression is diffused from facial Three Shades suggested a wholly new solution to
The second proposition refers to the expression, from depicted gesture and the problem of reconciling naturalism with the
economics of form as the first to the economics muscular contortion, into the animation of the monumental, which was to find its form in
of process. The figure is the sculpture, the entire surface. Rodin's first major public commission, The
sculpture is the figure. Only in face of the Age of In spite of its enormous illusion of life, the Burghers of Calais.
Bronze can one grasp today how so obvious a sculpture is, then, wholly an invention. This Part II will appear in the January 1973 issue.
conception could for a moment have exact coincidence of the abstract and
appeared so liberating. The main formal naturalistic is something that had not happened 'Rilke, 'Rodin', Grey Walls Press, London, 5946.
'Rodin, Catalogue to the Arts Council Hayward
components of nineteenth-century salon in sculpture since the Renaissance, and the Gallery Exhibition, 1970, p. 27.
sculpture were a diluted classicism of Age of Bronze has the character of being made 'Albert Elsen, Rodin, MOMA, New York, 1963.
composition coupled with a pedantic 'out of time'. It was a tour-de-force, but equally 4In Studio International, April, 1970.
5J. B. Leishman, 'Introduction to Rilke, Selected
naturalism of surface and detail. The impact of not capable of repetition; Rodin's next three Poems', Penguin Books, 1964.
225