Page 36 - Studio International - July August 1973

(Left) Rodin Balzac. 1897. Bronze, III in. high. Photo: John Webb
(Above) Degas Woman at her Toilet. 1885. Pastel. National Gallery, London

movement is countered by the enormous character as Eve, the studies for the Burghers of innovation, in terms of the history of the
physical stability of the pose, the spread, Calais, and the Balzac. It is in the final form of monument; truthful, in terms of Rodin's
straight legs forming that most stable of forms, the Burghers and the Balzac, Rodin's most avowed naturalism; economically expressive, in
the isosceles triangle. For any human being, to achieved and original public sculptures, that the that the general horizontal mass of the work,
stand erect, to resist gravity, means a continual, power of gravity as a structuring element is articulated by the repeated verticals and
if imperceptible, muscular effort; Rodin uses the most distinctly realized. The need in both off-verticals of the figures, in itself
figure to recapture this effort in sculptural terms. instances was for a sculpture whose over-all communicates the muted drama and pathos of
The most convincing figures are built up from shape would read at a distance, carrying the the depicted situation. Whereas the over-all form
the feet. The disproportionate mass of the feet burden of expression in itself, rather than in the is immensely stable, the stability of each of the
emphasizes their role as a gravitational anchor, posture or gesture of the component figures. figures is variously threatened. Even the four-
as matter coterminate with the ground: their The conventional pyramid form of public square Burgher with the Key gives one the feeling
position and relation determines that of the legs; monuments, while giving visual and physical that he is rocking back and forth on his feet. The
then, progressing upwards, hips, shoulders stability to the sculpture, implied a total light penetrates and eats into the spaces
and head. Rodin seems sometimes to have built gravitational unreality for the figures that between the figures, and especially between the
up his figures without armatures, working composed it. Rodin was dissatisfied with this two main groups. Viewed from the right-hand
centrally around a core of hardened clay. solution, both as an expressive cliché, and end, the insistent repetition of three exactly
Nothing could display more clearly Rodin's because it was utterly unreal in terms of the parallel and diagonal lower legs counteracts the
enormous skill, and his commitment to, and straightforward presentation of truth that he effect of the highly individual and exactly
understanding of clay, than his feeling for felt to be the duty of public art, while realized heads, by affirming the role of the
gravity in putting the structural role on an communicating a simple and urgent moral limbs, of twenty-four arms and legs, in a
essentially unstructional, inert material. The message. gravitationally and expressively unified
continuity of articulation from core to surface, The regular rectangle enclosing the Burghers structure. The Burghers of Calais is not, as is
from the ground upwards, through all the of Calais, with the heads of all the figures aligned sometimes said, six separate statues : it is as
members, is evident not only in such beautiful along the upper horizontal, the feet `architectural' as Rodin was capable of being,
pieces as the Prodigal Son and the Crouching demonstrably rooted on the level ground base, and is beyond a doubt his finest public
Woman discussed earlier, but in all his most was embodied in Rodin's initial conception of sculpture: the repeated internal verticals, the
complete and satisfying figures, as various in the sculpture; and is at once a formal arches formed by raised and gesturing arms,
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