"I invent nothing, I rediscover" - Auguste Rodin
Pierre de Wissant, Colossal Head (before 1908)
Whisper it. Despite Auguste Rodin's undoubted technical ability, his masterful way with marble, bronze, terracotta, and, most of all, plaster, and his well deserved place in the history of art just as classicism gave way to modernism I ended up walking away from The Making of Rodin at Tate Modern feeling a little underwhelmed.
These sculptures would, of course, be cold to the touch but surely the intention, neither of Rodin nor of the curators at the Tate, would not have been for the same sensation for the soul. It's a shame because I'd entered the exhibition hopeful that I would finally be able to learn why Rodin, above all other sculptors of his era - and many from others, is held very much to be the master.
The Kiss (1901-1904)
The answer as to why he's held up as the don was, to me, not forthcoming. That's not to say that the exhibition wasn't interesting or worthwhile. It was. With works as famous as The Kiss, The Thinker, and, my favourite, The Burghers of Calais on show how could it not be?
It's more that it felt a little dry and academic. The first thing I found out was that even Rodin himself wasn't fond of The Kiss. He felt it was too traditional and dismissed it, or the various versions of it - he liked to repeat himself, as a "sculpted knick-knack" but if this image of Italian nobles, Paolo Malatesta and Francesca da Rimini, passionately snogging with a copy of Dante's Inferno, now ignored, in Paolo's hand, is what Rodin said it is where does it leave the rest of his oeuvre?
The Age of Bronze (1877)
It's not like the other stuff he made is wildly different. At least not to contemporary eyes. It seems to me he just got better at what he did and Rodin, who described himself as beginning as an artisan before going on to become an artist, would presumably agree.
Born, the son of a police inspector, in a working class district of Paris in 1840, he suffered the indignity of repeated rejections from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and it wasn't until he made The Age of Bronze, at nearly forty years old, that the art world of France began to notice him and even then they were unkind about him.
They weren't scathing of his work. Quite the opposite. It was thought that his model of the young Belgian soldier, Auguste Neyt, was so convincing that Rodin must have, in some way, cheated while creating it. It can be safely assumed that Rodin was not best pleased to be the recipient of such brickbats but as befits a man who once said "patience is also a form of action" he both bided his time and rethought his process.
He would, from now on, look not just to make realistic representations of human form, too easy for him?, but he would seek, using fragmentation, multiplication, enlargement, and repetition, to show not just what humans look like and how they are represented but the rupture in the artistic process between observation and expression.
It was best demonstrated during an exhibition Rodin hosted in a specially constructed pavilion at the Place de l'Alma in Paris in 1900 and the Tate show leans heavily on this show which means it includes many more works in plaster than in either bronze or marble. The two materials most often associated with Rodin.
The Thinker, Monumental (1903)
Study for the Thinker (1881)
Possibly, this specificity is the show's weakness. I've not attended a major Rodin exhibition in London (or elsewhere) before and I was hoping for the full career retrospective. This felt a little partial and, spread out over nine rooms, even a little thin in places.
Many won't mind. They'll just be happy to be in the presence of one of Rodin's Thinkers. Originally conceived as part of The Gates of Hell, monumental bronze doors that were intended for a proposed Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris, The Thinker soon took on a life of his own. As with The Kiss, Dante's Inferno is an inspiration, but The Thinker is not lost in the emotions and actions of love but has retreated deep into his own mind.
Rodin proudly asserted that his Thinker did not think only with his brain but with his "knitted brow", his "compressed lips", and "with every muscle of his arms, backs and legs" as well as his "clenched fist" and "gripping toes". That's a lot of thinking but it never seems clear what he's actually thinking about and why he has to scrunch himself up into such an uncomfortable looking position to do so. I manage to have quite deep, and even dark, thoughts while lying on the sofa in what would appear to be a fairly relaxed position.
Balzac, Study of Nude with Large Belly, Without Head, the Left Arm Bent Behind the Back (c.1894)
The Walking Man, Large Version (1907)
What I'm saying is, is that Rodin's Thinker is not so much thinking but making a performance of thinking, letting everyone know just how deep and profound a thinker he is. He's showing off - and sometimes it feels to me like Rodin, himself, is showing off too.
His Walking Man, inspired by a sculpture he made of John the Baptist - a man who knows the score, was enlarged using a pantograph but no reason is given for why. Why it was enlarged or why it was even made other than to show Rodin's deft handling of plaster. That's fine. A lot of art is made simply to show how clever the artist in question is. But it doesn't really speak to me of modernity. If you attend a show by Picasso, Dali, Duchamp, or the Abstract Expressionists of the United States there is reason as much as there is method.
I greedily wanted the same from Rodin. I waited for revelation but it never arrived. Information boards placed on the walls explained to me why so many of Rodin's works were white (from the widespread misunderstanding, and one most of us are now fully aware of, that the sculpture of antiquity in Greece and Rome were white), and his interest in movement and fluidity (he often got his sitters to move around while he sculpted them), and there is even a small room of paintings to show that Rodin could handle a brush as well as a chisel.
Balzac, Final Study (1897)
Female Nude Standing Near Two Snakes (c.1895-1900)
Nymph Games (c.1900-1910)
None of it was bad and much of it was good but still the penny didn't drop for me as to why Rodin is held so highly above all others. I was also getting curious as to what his obsession with Balzac was. Turns out Rodin was commissioned, in 1891, to make a monument to the author of La Comedie humaine who had died four decades earlier.
Rodin considered it to be the 'product' of his entire life and the turning point of his aesthetics yet people laughed at it and mocked him for making it. He took pride in the fact that they couldn't, at least, destroy it. To create his Balzac(s) he employed a cart driver from Tours (where Balzac was born) as a model but, after experimenting with different kinds of drapery and moving Balzac's arms around, found, on the work's unveiling in 1898 that the finished product was too abstract for 19c public taste. Either the cart driver/model was a very unusual looking man or Rodin was making good use of artistic license.
Eugene Druet - Rodin among his works in the Pavilion de l'Alma, Meudon (c.1902)
Mask of Camille Claudel and Left Hand of Pierre de Wissant (after 1900)
Looking at the Balzacs on show at the Tate, it's hard to tell which and that is another weakness. Stories are begun that never reach a satisfactory ending or the illustrations, artworks, that would help tell the story are missing from the exhibition leaving the stories feeling both incomplete and unsatisfactory.
There is some interesting background on Rodin's assistant, and later partner and mother of his only child, Rose Beuret. She was a former seamstress who became Rodin's model before being elevated to assistant and, ultimately, lover. The German aristocrat and socialite Helene von Nostitz and the Japanese dancer Ohta Hisa, known as Hanako (meaning Little Flower), were others who came into Rodin's orbit and informed his work.
We learn that they both sat, many times, for Rodin but we learn little of how the busts that Rodin made of them informed his development or what these relationships really added to Rodin's work and there is little, or nothing, in the Tate to show from this era. At least there is a 'mask' of Camille Claudel who seems a far more interesting figure than a mere muse.
Being a woman, in France, in the 19c, Claudel was not permitted to enter formal art schools, was excluded from official competitions, and barred from taking commissions. To Rodin's great credit, he gave Claudel a chance. Offering her a job as a studio assistant where she became, depressingly and predictably, his mistress.
When Rodin refused to leave Rose Beuret, Claudel ended the relationship but it had been a productive one artistically for both of them and, in this instance, the curators of The Making of Rodin have provided some evidence of this. There's also plenty of proof that Rodin built up a large collection of sculpted arms and legs (which he referred to as 'abbatis' or 'giblets'). This stockpile of human resources, and some large photographs affixed to various walls, at least give us some understanding of what Rodin's studio, and practice, was like.
Limbs (various dates)
Monument to the Burghers of Calais (1889)
Monument to the Burghers of Calais (1889)
For me, though, the highlight of the exhibition is the room that contains the Monument to the Burghers of Calais. It's both the most aesthetically pleasing and the most educational thing there and I can only wish that the rest of the exhibition had been as good.
In 1346/7 when the French port of Calais was besieged by King Edward III of England, it was agreed by the Plantagenet warlord king that he would spare the townspeople if six of their leaders surrendered to him with ropes around their necks in preparation for their own execution. Eustache de Saint-Pierre and five fellow citizens volunteered to make the ultimate sacrifice but were, somehow, spared.
When, in 1885, Rodin was tasked with creating a monument to Eustache de Saint-Pierre he decided, instead, to also celebrate the five unnamed burghers as well. Withered bodies in wispy garments with bare and bruised feet were created and made just that bit larger than life and Rodin decided to shelve his initial plan of installing the sculpture high up so that they would be placed on the same level as the viewer.
A bronze model of the sculpture stands in Victoria Tower Gardens near the Houses of Parliament to this day and I have often stopped to admire it, Unlike so much else in the show, The Burghers of Calais doesn't seem to be Rodin showboating. Instead, it shows he is capable of creating empathetic art. The sad, yet proud, faces of the burghers are both haunting and resilient and the fact that is larger than life, but not much, places the whole ensemble firmly into uncanny valley territory.
The Hand of God (1898)
Bernes & Marouteau - Pavilion de l'Alma, Meudon (after 1917)
The Three Shades (before 1886)
The Burghers of Calais arrive roughly halfway through the show but, sadly, do not lead to an overall improvement. If anything, journeying back to the club house along the back nine is even less remarkable. There's a Hand of God that made me think of weak Maradona jokes, there are descriptions - rather dull ones - of his working process, there are boasts of his collection of antiquities and amphorae from Greece to Japan and Egypt to China, and there's even a frankly implausible claim that his work somehow inspired Surrealism.
Both Victor Hugo and Rainer Maria Rilke get a namedrop, Rodin was well connected in his later career of course, and there are sculptures that are pleasant to look at but start, after a fashion, to all look a bit samey. Once the exhibition in 1900 had given Roden star status it seems as if he started coasting. Sat on his laurels, the genius of sculpture need no longer innovate. He had done his bit and the art world hailed him for it.
That's not the story The Making of Rodin tells, quite the opposite, but it's the way I read it from the show they put together. I still believe there could easily be a Rodin show that would make an equally valid counterpoint to my interpretation but, for me, this exhibition showed that Rodin was a good artist, a talented sculptor, and that he had some innovative ideas. Just not as many as he, or the curators, or art historians elsewhere, seem to think so.
As far back as biblical times we have been warned that our heroes will always be revealed to have feet of clay. In Rodin's instance, this can be read as literally as it can metaphorically.
Triton and Nereid, Large Model (before 1907)
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