"Free Play"

"When a woman combs her hair," said Rodin, "the movement of the stars can be traced in her gestures." Before he died in 1917, Rodin had traced thousands of such starry motions.

In his last days, when his greatest sculptures--like the seated Thinker--had already passed into history, Rodin did little modeling. But the white-bearded master, who looked like a prophet by Michelangelo, saw no reason to stop working. ("I have always lived like a workman," said he, "the pleasure of working enabled me to' endure everything.")

After 60 Rodin made his best drawings, which nowadays most critics prefer to his statues. He used to set models loose in his studio like doves, and watch them move --his pencil poised like a hawk in midair. Compared with the flying line of his drawings, some of Rodin's sculpture seems trapped in the clay.

Poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was once Rodin's secretary, described what his boss was after: "Rodin assumed that if caught quickly, the simple movements of the model . . . contain the strength of an expression which is not surmised, because one is not wont to follow it with intense and constant attention. By not permitting his eyes to leave the model for an instant, and by allowing his quick and trained hand free play over the drawing paper, Rodin seized an enormous number of never before observed and hitherto unrecorded gestures of which the radiating force of expression was immense."

Last week some seldom-seen Rodin drawings were on view in a Manhattan gallery; others were included in a Rodin show at Washington's National Gallery. Visitors were inclined to agree with Rilke that Rodin had achieved greatness through the "free play" of his "quick and trained hand." The drawings looked free as the wind--and actually were just as bound as the wind is by nature. Rodin drew just what he saw. "After all," remarked the old man once, "the artist has only to trust his eyes."

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