Humorous or deeply human: the surprising duality of Rodin’s sculptures
I spent a large part of last weekend trying to contain my laughter while staring at Rodin sculptures – and they say that the Covid youth don’t know how to have fun.
My laughter has a simple explanation: I attempted to draw Auguste Rodin’s famous early sculpture The Age of Bronze (1875). In my hands, Rodin’s mastery of unbelievably perfect anatomy had become somewhat butchered. At one point, Rodin’s model Auguste Ney looked like he was the unfortunate victim of a poorly done Brazilian bum lift; “The Age of Silicone” doesn’t quite have the same gravitas.
London is currently spoiled for Rodin sculptures. Alongside the permanent collection at the V&A, donated by the artist at the outbreak of WWI, the Tate Modern is also hosting an exhibition “The Making of Rodin” – a focus on the plaster casts, studies, and fragments of the artist’s work.
Rodin is a big name in the art history world, known – mistakenly – for what appear to be “classical” bronze and marble sculptures. Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his 1902 essay on the artist that “Rodin’s message and its significance are little understood by the many men who gathered about him”; they “assembled about the name, not about the work”.
Over a hundred years later, the same could still be said: Rodin’s position on a critical pedestal prevents interaction with his work. Everyone knows The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Walking Man – and, one of the benefits of sculpture, there are versions of these works in many cities – but there’s often little passion surrounding the artist.
Born in 1840 and dying just after the end of the First World War, Rodin was condemned to being not quite staid enough for the nineteenth century, and too nineteenth century for the modernists. One of his best works, the Monument to Balzac, was too radical ever to be cast in his lifetime.
After the end of the First World War, the likes of Gaston Lachaise and, later, Alberto Giacometti took on the mantle. Rodin exhibited in London in 1914, but, on the surface, it is hard to reconcile his figures with the radicalism of the likes of Wyndham Lewis and the Blast manifesto.
There is, however, an argument to be made for Rodin’s peri-modernist place in art history. Rodin was committed to revelling in what Rilke calls “the plastic art, to which truth belonged”. Whilst his sculptures are masters of intense anatomical observation – The Age of Bronze was thought to be cast from the model’s body rather than sculpted; Rodin was so accurate as to be accused of cheating– they are more than just faithful reproductions of the human form. And they are far from classical. Many of his models are too muscular or in too off-kilter a position.
From his studies for St John the Baptist Preaching – later The Walking Man – to The Man with the Broken Nose, Rodin is less interested in human perfection in plaster or marble than he is the limits and rough edges of this perfection. What makes The Walking Man so striking is the fact that Rodin has done away with anatomical precision: the arms and head have been indelicately lopped off. Whilst The Thinker might be the most famous sculpture of modern times, Rodin insisted that its foot be exhibited separately. A huge foot, alone on a pedestal. The modernist impulse to divide, dissect, and defamiliarise was never far away.
The Tate’s exhibition goes a long way to introducing this aspect of Rodin’s work to its viewers. After The Age of Bronze, the exhibition opens up into a huge room of plaster casts and studies – not unlike how photos record Rodin’s studio. Studies are given as much precedence as finished sculptures, and attention is drawn to the fact that Rodin revelled in the unfinished; curators emphasise where Rodin left visible seams, or how he reused body parts and heads.
The Thinker and The Burghers of Calais are predictably dominant – for reasons of size, if nothing else. But there is an insistent presence and intensity to others of Rodin’s sculptures. The cabinet of “gimlets” – tiny arms and legs – is eery in its repetition and fragmentation, whilst Rodin’s drawings and watercolours are deserving of an exhibition in their own right. It is arguably the decapitated, portly form of Balzac in the centre of the main room that is most captivating. And it is here that my second round of laughter crept in.
Rodin was commissioned to make a sculpture of Balzac by the Societé de Gens Lettres in 1891. The sculpture was meant to take eighteen months, and the commission had previously been given to the neoclassical artist Henri Chapu before his death. Seven years later – and with no hint of neoclassicism in sight – Rodin unveiled his finished plaster cast. There is no way to really describe the finished product, other than that it looks very little like Balzac, and you could say it amounts to little more than a head above a sack.
I’m only partly being facetious – the sculpture is one of my favourite pieces of art; its brilliance lies in this intentionally disconcerting form. Rodin spent years making studies of bodies, faces, and limbs – and even went to the lengths of commissioning Balzac’s tailor to make a suit in his exact measurements and finding models that would fit it perfectly. After these years of careful preparations (Rodin also worked from a daguerreotype photo of the author), why is the finished product so non-representational? It can’t be said that Rodin couldn’t have made a faithful likeness of the author.
Rather, Rodin actively chose not to. In one of the studies – Balzac, Second Nude Study F (1886) – the figure has an erect penis, which he is holding with clenched hands. He is standing with a somewhat backwards tilt so that his hips are thrust forward. The pose is forcibly sexual. This nude figure forms the basis for the final form; Rodin simply adjoined a head and placed a plaster-soaked cloth on top of the body.
Upon receiving his first public commission, Rodin decided to depict the much-loved author masturbating. You could make an argument here about Rodin’s non-representational choices – this is an appeal to sub-intellectual impulses, a look at the psyche rather than the human form, et cetera…
But really – let’s just take a moment to applaud the comic genius — what a master wind-up merchant. Supposing you need a good laugh, head down to the Tate.
The EY Exhibition: The Making of Rodin is open at Tate Britain until 21 November.