The Old Man and the Clay

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Washington, a huge retrospective reveals the real Rodin

In scale, scope, curatorial intelligence and the intensity of the vision it discloses, "Rodin Rediscovered"--an exhibition of some 400 sculptures, drawings and photographs that opened last week at Washington's National Gallery--may be the most impressive tribute an American museum has ever offered to a 19th century sculptor. Drawn from collections all over the world, but mainly from the Musee Rodin in Paris, the show is to sculpture, in effect, what the Museum of Modern Art's 1977 Cezanne exhibition was to painting: a means of making us see afresh the processes and fantasies, the obsessions and failures and triumphs of a very great artist whose work we assumed to be familiar. Who does not know Auguste Rodin, given that reproductions of The Kiss and The Thinker are the very furniture of cliche? Yet this exhibition shows us what we did not know. It brings forth not the debased Rodin of popular culture, or Rodin the herald of a modernism he did not live to see, but the actual artist, embedded in the 19th century, soaked in its values and yet struggling to transcend and alter them. It also clarifies, as never before, the taxing issue of what makes a Rodin "original." He did not work like a modern artist. He seldom carved his own marbles, never cast his bronzes, and turned his models over to assistants so that they could be done in a gamut of sizes. Paperweight to Large Economy Monument. Yet his artistic control remained absolute.

For this devout and extensive work of disentanglement, the main credit must go to the show's organizer, Stanford Art Historian Albert E. Elsen, the dean of Rodin scholars; but it is also the work of a formidable team of French and American art historians who contributed essays to the catalogue, including Ruth Butler (on Rodin's context as a working artist in the 19th century salons) and Kirk Varnedoe (on Rodin's drawings and the role of photography in his work). For Elsen, this show is the summa of 20 years' engagement with its subject.

It is compendious: there are, for instance, 40 sculptures, 50 drawings and 50 photographs that have never been exhibited or reproduced before. There is also a new bronze cast of Rodin's climactic work, The Gates of Hell, commissioned by a foundation set up by the artist's most obsessed American enthusiast, the collector B. Gerald Cantor; and the Gates can now be seen in the context of other, related Rodins for the first time since its plaster was exhibited in 1900.

It would be hard to think of an artist who better deserved all this effort. Rodin had no successful followers because, as V.S. Naipaul once remarked of Charles Dickens, "the very magnitude of his vision, its absorption into myth, precluded as grand an attempt." There would, of course, be great sculptors after Rodin, but none of them, not even Henry Moore, was able to release such torrents of expressive power from the sole image of the human body. Pathos, energy, despair, entropic exhaustion, orgasmic pleasure: every shade of meaning, every opposed sensation that the body can display, found its way into his oeuvre.

Rodin had very few inhibitions; flesh, both his own and others', was a source of inexhaustible fascination to him, and the erotic fury one often senses in his squeezing and manipulation of the clay was by no means a metaphor. One of his friends recorded a conversation with Rodin in his old age, as the sculptor talked about an antique copy of the Venus di Medici that stood in his studio: "He spoke in a low voice, with the ardor of a devotee, bending before the marble as if he loved it. 'It is truly flesh!' he said, and beaming, he added: 'You would think it moulded by kisses and caresses!' Then, suddenly, laying his hands upon the statue: 'You almost expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm.' "

The myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (the sculptor falling in love with the figure he had carved) had vast resonance for Rodin; in his marble Pygmalion and Galatea, 1910, the girl emerging from the stone seems literally shaped by the carved sculptor's own passion, as though the contrasts between consciousness and dream, body and effigy, art and life, subject and object could all be packed into one erotic metaphor. No wonder that when he made his image of The Sculptor and His Muse (circa 1890), the Muse's hand was laid encouragingly on the sculptor's genitals. Rodin was no ordinary phallocrat.

His sculpture now appears unassailably better than that of any of his French contemporaries--a point vividly made by the first court of the exhibition, in which representative works from the salons of the 1870s are juxtaposed with Rodin's. This witty melange serves to indicate what Rodin absorbed by way of themes, images and treatments from lesser men like Jean-Paul Aube, whose figure of Dante conversing with a damned soul may have helped start the train of thought that led to The Gates of Hell, or Alexandre Falguiere, whose monument to Lamartine is distantly echoed in Rodin's bronze crag of literature, the Balzac. Yet Rodin's superiority was not so evident when he was young. His father was a small fonctionnaire, stuck in the French bureaucratic anthill. His school record was poor, and he failed three times to be accepted by the main art school in Paris, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. Until his early 30s, nothing he made was noted, and he simply contributed his anonymous efforts to the studios of other sculptors, patinating, chasing, designing decorative masks--the laborious hackwork of an age of commemorative sculpture. He was in his late 30s before he managed to get a major sculpture on public exhibit in France (The Age of Bronze). If ever a great artist lived out the conventional trajectory from obscurity through unpopularity and thence to notoriety and patriarchal fame, it was Rodin.

In some way he seems such a modern artist. There is, to begin with, the relentless autophagy: the cannibalizing, part by part, of his own images in numerous variations, a self-reflexive mode of invention that one associates more with Picasso than anyone earlier. This point is brought home dramatically by the gallery of motifs from The Gates of Hell, from The Thinker itself (originally meant to be the central figure over the doorway, a Dante dreaming the whole Inferno) to the battalion of flying, crouching, writhing figures, bare forked animals all, that crowd the plinths.

Then there is the refusal to submit to external schemes or narratives. The Gates of Hell cannot be read as clearly as a Renaissance fresco or a medieval Last Judgment. It is less about divine doom than the condition of secular despair, mauvaise foi, the unrooting of the self--a vast and almost illegibly complex dirge that touches now and then on the original imagery of the Inferno but does not, in any strict sense, illustrate it. Yet its formal properties--the sudden shifts of scale, the aggressive protrusions of figures from the bronze skin, the sense of strain and rupture--speak more eloquently of dislocation and frustration than any orthodox treatment could have hoped to do.

There is the overwhelming sexual frankness, and the refusal to idealize the body's postures; Rodin's poses do not belong to earlier sculpture. Then, finally, there is the fragmentation of the body itself as a sculptural object. Rodin's work was permeated by his love of Michelangelo and the expressive power of the non-finito, the sculpture as unfinished block. But his use of the "partial figure"--the headless striding man, the ecstatically capering figure of Iris, Messenger of the Gods--went beyond such conventions as the body not yet released from its mass of raw stone, or even the broken antique fragment. It was a way of asserting the power of reduction, a demonstration that the expressive power of human form could be so concentrated as to drop, without loss, such usual signifiers of emotion as the head. This predicted the fragmentation of later modernist sculpture, just as surely as Rodin's ideas about organic form clearly pointed forward to Arp and Moore. "The truth of my figures," he remarked, "instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself."

Those who found him inspiring were right. Those who find him inhibiting are also right, for Rodin was a man of 19th century amplitude and not 20th century doubt. What sculptor, today, could one expect to possess such reserves of feeling, such an indifference to the errors of his own fecundity, or so unrestrained a tragic sense? To compare him with Michelangelo is not, in the end, impertinent, for Rodin was one of the last artists to live and work in the belief that making sculpture--despite the potboilers and failures in his output--was a moral act, that it could express one's whole sense of being in the world, and, by uttering it, make the self exemplary.

--By Robert Hughes

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