Page 50 - Studio International - January 1973
P. 50
189os — nonetheless, if one leaves the major
public commissions and the portrait heads on
one side, together with the general mass of
pot-boiling and commercial work,
enlargements and repeats in marble that came
out of his studio in response to his increasing
public success, one can still, without forcing the
facts, observe a succession of attempts, the
high points of his sculpture, to deal with the
single figure, his central theme, to reconcile its
dual nature as invented and representational
structure. The succession of these attempts is in
the direction of an increasing abstractness,
towards the frank acknowledgement of an
internal, sculptural order, which evoked, rather
than represented the figure. The final turn in
this development may fairly be taken to be the
late small figures of dancers.
These sculptures, it should be remembered,
were made after Brancusi's Prayer and The Kiss
(1907) and Matisse's marvellous trio of
sculptures of the same period, the first
Reclining Figure, the Serpentine and the Two
Negresses, all images of total stability and
architectural unity; Rodin's dancers challenge
the younger men's work with a totally liberated
gestalt, and an even more violent distortion of
anatomy in the interest of the representation of
Prodigal Son c. 1885-7 Walking Man 1877-8 abandoned movement. These figures were no
Bronze 541 x 32 x 27+ in. Bronze 33 x 11 X 22 1/2 in. sudden invention, but the culmination of a
Trustees of the Tate Gallery, London Founder: Alexis Rudier prolonged series of studies, 'improvisations',
Coll. Henry Moore OM CH
rapid impressions of postures which Rodin had
made for many years. They seem to have
surfaced, become public, during his last period,
and appropriately so. The whole figure is
usually represented, as in the Prodigal Son: but
the process of re-invention of anatomy in terms
of the posture is taken to the point at which the
shape and proportion of the parts defy
recognition. The small size of the figures
suggests they were made wholly in the
sculptor's hand, and they enjoy the freedom of
orientation, the identification of the handling of
this soft material with structure that this process
allows. It is no longer anatomy but the action of
the hand in clay that determines the structure of
the figure. The idea of 'making' could not be
more plainly fulfilled.
Several important aspects of Rodin's
sculpture I have not touched on, and plan to
deal with in a second essay. Only thirty years
elapsed between the Age of Bronze and
Brancusi's Kiss. When the main direction of
Rodin's effort during this period is established,
and the various distractions and dead-ends,
however popular or attractive, are ignored, what
emerges is a new and abstract language of
sculpture, concerned with structure and material
volume and space, but centred on a sense of the
physical, of the character and performance of
the human body. I have no reason to think
things have much altered since; indeed the full
range of this language was not realized until
David Smith liberated 'construction' from its
association with 'the object' into a new realm in
Iris, Messenger of the Gods 1890-1
Bronze 37 1/2 x 34 1/4 x 15 3/4 in. which gravity was reorganized as the common
Rodin Museum, Paris condition of the sculpture and the spectator. q
40
