Here is the real Rodin—relaxed, intimate, open, and charming—offering a wealth of observations on the relationship of sculpture to poetry, painting, theater, and music. He also makes perceptive comments on Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other great artists, and he shares revealing anecdotes about Hugo, Balzac, and others who posed for him. Seventy-six superb illustrations of the sculptor's works complement the text, including St John the Baptist Preaching, The Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, and many others, along with a selection of exuberant drawings and prints.
Here is the real Rodin—relaxed, intimate, open, and charming—offering a wealth of observations on the relationship of sculpture to poetry, painting, theater, and music. He also makes perceptive comments on Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other great artists, and he shares revealing anecdotes about Hugo, Balzac, and others who posed for him. Seventy-six superb illustrations of the sculptor's works complement the text, including St John the Baptist Preaching, The Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, and many others, along with a selection of exuberant drawings and prints.
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Here is the real Rodin—relaxed, intimate, open, and charming—offering a wealth of observations on the relationship of sculpture to poetry, painting, theater, and music. He also makes perceptive comments on Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other great artists, and he shares revealing anecdotes about Hugo, Balzac, and others who posed for him. Seventy-six superb illustrations of the sculptor's works complement the text, including St John the Baptist Preaching, The Burghers of Calais, The Thinker, and many others, along with a selection of exuberant drawings and prints.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780486156781 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dover Publications |
| Publication date: | 07/10/2012 |
| Series: | Dover Fine Art, History of Art |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 119 |
| File size: | 21 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
Read an Excerpt
Rodin on Art and Artists
With 76 Illustrations of His Work
By AUGUSTE RODIN, Romilly Fedden
Dover Publications, Inc.
Copyright © 1983 Dover Publications, Inc.All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-486-15678-1
CHAPTER 1
REALISM IN ART
AT the end of the long rue de l'Université, close to the Champ-de-Mars, in acorner, so deserted and monastic that you might think yourself in the provinces, is the Depot des Marbres.
Here in a great grass-grown court sleep heavy grayish blocks, presenting in places fresh breaks of frosted whiteness. These are the marbles reserved by the State for the sculptors whom she honors with her orders.
Along one side of this courtyard is a row of a dozen ateliers which have been granted to different sculptors. A little artist city, marvellously tranquil, it seems the fraternity house of a new order. Rodin occupies two of these cells; in one he houses the plaster cast of his Gates of Hell, astonishing even in its unfinished state, and in the other he works.
More than once I have been to see him here towards evening, when his day of toil drew to its close, and taking a chair, I have waited for the moment when the night would oblige him to stop, and I have studied him at his work. The desire to profit by the last rays of daylight threw him into a fever.
I see him now, rapidly shaping his little figures from the clay. It is a game which he enjoys in the intervals of the more patient care which he gives to his big figures. These sketches flung off on the instant delight him, because they permit him to seize the fleeting beauty of a gesture whose fugitive truth would escape deeper and longer study.
His method of work is singular. In his atelier several nude models walk about or rest.
Rodin pays them to furnish him constantly with the sight of the nude moving with all the freedom of life. He observes them without ceasing, and it is thus that he has long since become familiar with the sight of muscles in movement. The nude, which for us moderns is an exceptional revelation and which even for the sculptors is generally only an apparition whose length is limited to a sitting, has become to Rodin a customary sight. The constant familiarity with the human body which the ancient Greeks acquired in watching the games—the wrestling, the throwing of the discus, the boxing, the gymnastics, and the foot races—and which permitted their artists to talk naturally on the subject of the nude, the creator of the Penseur has made sure of by the continual presence of unclothed human beings who come and go before his eyes. In this way he has learned to read the feelings as expressed in every part of the body. The face is generally considered as the only mirror of the soul; the mobility of the features of the face seems to us the only exterior expression of the spiritual life. In reality there is not a muscle of the body which does not express the inner variations of feeling. All speak of joy or of sorrow, of enthusiasm or of despair, of serenity or of madness. Outstretched arms, an unconstrained body, smile with as much sweetness as the eyes or the lips. But to be able to interpret every aspect of the flesh, one must have been drawn patiently to spell out and to read the pages of this beautiful book. The masters of the antique did this, aided by the customs of their civilization. Rodin does this in our own day by the force of his own will.
He follows his models with his earnest gaze, he silently savors the beauty of the life which plays through them, he admires the suppleness of this young woman who bends to pick up a chisel, the delicate grace of this other who raises her arms to gather her golden hair above her head, the nervous vigor of a man who walks across the room; and when this one or that makes a movement that pleases him, he instantly asks that the pose be kept. Quick, he seizes the clay, and a little figure is under way; then with equal haste he passes to another, which he fashions in the same manner.
One evening when the night had begun to darken the atelier with heavy shadows, I had a talk with the master on his method.
"What astonishes me in you," said I, "is that you work quite differently from your confrères. I know many of them and have seen them at work. They make the model mount upon a pedestal called the throne, and they tell him to take such or such a pose. Generally they bend or stretch his arms and legs to suit them, they bow his head or straighten his body exactly as though he were a clay figure. Then they set to work. You, on the contrary, wait till your models take an interesting attitude, and then you reproduce it. So much so that it is you who seem to be at their orders rather than they at yours."
Rodin, who was engaged in wrapping his figurines in damp cloths, answered quietly:
"I am not at their orders, but at those of Nature! My confrères doubtless have their reasons for working as you have said. But in thus doing violence to nature and treating human beings like puppets, they run the risk of producing lifeless and artificial work.
"As for me, seeker after truth and student of life as I am, I shall take care not to follow their example. I take from life the movements I observe, but it is not I who impose them.
"Even when a subject which I am working on compels me to ask a model for a certain fixed pose, I indicate it to him, but I carefully avoid touching him to place him in the position, for I will reproduce only what reality spontaneously offers me.
"I obey Nature in everything, and I never pretend to command her. My only ambition is to be servilely faithful to her."
"Nevertheless," I answered with some malice, "it is not nature exactly as it is that you evoke in your work."
He stopped short, the damp cloth in his hands. "Yes, exactly as it is!" he replied, frowning.
"You are obliged to alter——"
"Not a jot!"
"But, after all, the proof that you do change it is this, that the cast would give not at all the same impression as your work."
He reflected an instant and said: "That is so! Because the cast is less true than my sculpture!
"It would be impossible for any model to keep an animated pose during all the time that it would take to make a cast from it. But I keep in my mind the ensemble of the pose and I insist that the model shall conform to my memory of it. More than that,—the cast only reproduces the exterior; I reproduce, besides that, the spirit which is certainly also a part of nature.
"I see all the truth, and not only that of the outside.
"I accentuate the lines which best express the spiritual state that I interpret."
As he spoke he showed me on a pedestal nearby one of his most beautiful statues, a young man kneeling, raising suppliant arms to heaven. All his being is drawn out with anguish. His body is thrown backwards. The breast heaves, the throat is tense with despair, and the hands are thrown out towards some mysterious being to which they long to cling.
"Look!" he said to me; "I have accented the swelling of the muscles which express distress. Here, here, there—I have exaggerated the straining of the tendons which indicate the outburst of prayer."
And, with a gesture, he underlined the most vigorous parts of his work.
"I have you, Master!" I cried ironically; "you say yourself that you have accented, accentuated, exaggerated. You see, then, that you have changed nature."
He began to laugh at my obstinacy.
"No," he replied. "I have not changed it. Or, rather, if I have done it, it was without suspecting it at the time. The feeling which influenced my vision showed me Nature as I have copied her.
"If I had wished to modify what I saw and to make it more beautiful, I should have produced nothing good."
An instant later he continued:
"I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.
"But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in aesthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature.
"The only thing is to see.
"Oh, doubtless a mediocre man copying nature will never produce a work of art; because he really looks without seeing, and though he may have noted each detail minutely, the result will be flat and without character. But the profession of artist is not meant for the mediocre, and to them the best counsels will never succeed in giving talent.
"The artist, on the contrary, sees; that is to say, that his eye, grafted on his heart, reads deeply into the bosom of Nature.
"That is why the artist has only to trust to his eyes."
CHAPTER 2TO THE ARTIST ALL IN NATURE IS BEAUTIFUL
IN Rodin's great atelier at Meudon stands a cast of that statuette, so magnificently ugly, which the great sculptor wrought upon the text of Villon's poem, La Belle Heaulmière.
The courtesan, once radiant with youth and grace, is now repulsive with age and decrepitude. Once proud of her beauty, she is now filled with shame at her ugliness.
Ha, vieillesse felonne et fière,
Pourquoi m'as tu si tôt abattue?
Qui me tient que je ne me fière (frappe)
Et qu'à ce coup je ne me tue!
[Ah! proud and traitorous old age! Why have you so soon brought me low? Why do you hold me so that I cannot strike and with the stroke end my sorrow?]
The sculptor has followed the poet step by step. The old hag, more shrivelled than a mummy, mourns her physical decay. Bent double, crouching on her haunches, she gazes despairingly upon her breasts so pitiably shrunken, upon her hideously wrinkled body, upon her arms and legs more knotty than vine stocks.
Quand je pense, las! au bon temps,
Quelle fus, quelle devenue,
Quand me regarde toute nue
Et je me vois si très changée,
Pauvre, sèche, maigre, menue,
Je suis presque tout enragée!
Qu'est devenu ce front poh,
Ces cheveux blonds....
Ces gentes épaules menues,
Petites tetins, hanches charnues,
Elevées, propres, faictisse (faites à souhait)
A tenir d'amoureuses lices;
C'est d'humaine beauté l'issue!
Les bras courts et les mains contraictes (contractées),
Les épaules toutes bossue.
Mamelles, quoi! toutes retraites (desséchées)
Telles les hanches et que les tettes!
Quant aux cuisses,
Cuisses ne sont plus, mais cuissettes
Grivelées comme saucisses!
[Ah! proud and traitorous old age!
Why have you so soon brought me low? Why do you hold me so that I cannot strike and with the stroke end my sorrow?
When I think wearily on what I was, of what I am, when I see how changed I am—poor, dried-up, thin—I am enraged! Where is my white forehead—my golden hair—my beautiful shoulders, all in me made for love? This is the end of human beauty! These short arms, these thin hands, these humped shoulders. These breasts—these hips—these limbs—dried and speckled as sausages!]
The sculptor does not fall below the poet in realism. On the contrary, his work, in the horror which it inspires, is perhaps even more impressive than the truculent verses of Maître Villon. The skin hangs in flaccid folds upon the skeleton; the ribs stand out beneath the parchment that covers them, and the whole figure seems to totter, to tremble, to shrivel, to shrink away.
Yet from this spectacle, at once grotesque and heartrending, a great sorrow breathes.
For what we have before us is the infinite distress of a poor foolish soul which, enamoured of eternal youth and beauty, looks on helpless at the ignominious disgrace of its fleshly envelope; it is the antithesis of the spiritual being which demands endless joy and of the body which wastes away, decays, ends in nothingness. The substance perishes, the flesh dies, but dreams and desires are immortal.
This is what Rodin has wished to make us understand.
And I do not think that any other artist has ever pictured old age with such savage crudity, except one. In the Baptistery of Florence you see upon an altar a strange statue by Donatello—anold woman naked, or at least draped only in the long, thin hair which clings foully to her ruined body. It is Saint Magdalene in the desert, bowed with age, offering to God the cruel mortifications to which she subjects her body as a punishment for the care which she formerly lavished upon it.
The savage sincerity of the Florentine master is so great that it is not even surpassed by Rodin himself. But, aside from this, the sentiment of the two works differs completely, for, while Saint Magdalene in her voluntary renunciation seems to grow more radiant as she sees herself growing more repulsive, the old Heaulmière is terrified at finding herself like a very corpse.
The modern sculpture is, therefore, much more tragic than the older work.
One day, having studied this figure in the atelier for some moments in silence, I said:
"Master, no one admires this astonishing figure more than I, but I hope you will not be annoyed if I tell you the effect it produces upon many of the visitors to the Musée du Luxembourg, especially upon the women."
"I shall be much obliged to you if you will."
"Well, the public generally turn away from it, crying, 'Oh, how ugly it is!' and I have often seen women cover their eyes with their hands to shut out the sight."
Rodin laughed heartily.
"My work must be eloquent," he said, "to make such a vivid impression, and doubtless these are people who dread stern philosophic truths.
"But what solely matters to me is the opinion of people of taste, and I have been delighted to gain their approbation for my Vieille Heaulmière. I am like that Roman singer who replied to the jeers of the populace: Equitibus cano. I sing only for the nobles! that is to say, for the connoisseurs.
"The vulgar readily imagine that what they consider ugly in existence is not fit subject for the artist. They would like to forbid us to represent what displeases and offends them in nature.
"It is a great error on their part.
"What is commonly called ugliness in nature can in art become full of great beauty.
"In the domain of fact we call ugly whatever is deformed, whatever is unhealthy, whatever suggests the ideas of disease, of debility, or of suffering, whatever is contrary to regularity, which is the sign and condition of health and strength: a hunchback is ugly, one who is bandy-legged is ugly, poverty in rags is ugly.
"Ugly also are the soul and the conduct of the immoral man, of the vicious and criminal man, of the abnormal man who is harmful to society; ugly the soul of the parricide, of the traitor, of the unscrupulously ambitious.
"And it is right that beings and objects from which he can expect only evil should be called by such an odious epithet. But let a great artist or a great writer make use of one or the other of these uglinesses, instantly it is transfigured: with a touch of his fairy wand he has turned it into beauty; it is alchemy; it is enchantment!
"Let Velasquez paint Sebastian, the dwarf of Philip IV. He endows him with such a touching gaze that we instantly read in it all the painful secret of this poor afflicted creature, forced, for his livelihood, to lower his human dignity, to become a plaything, a living bauble. And the more poignant the martyrdom of the conscience lodged in this grotesque body, the more beautiful is the artist's work.
"Let François Millet represent a peasant resting for a moment as he leans on the handle of his hoe, a wretched man worn by fatigue, baked by the sun, as stupid as a beast of burden dulled by blows—he has only to put into the expression of this poor devil a sublime resignation to the suffering ordained by Destiny, to make this creature of a nightmare become for us the great symbol of all Humanity.
"Let Baudelaire describe a festering corpse, unclean, viscid, eaten by worms, and let him but imagine his beloved mistress under this frightful aspect, and nothing can equal in splendor his picture of this terrible juxtaposition of beauty which we could wish eternal and the atrocious disintegration which awaits it.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Rodin on Art and Artists by AUGUSTE RODIN, Romilly Fedden. Copyright © 1983 Dover Publications, Inc.. Excerpted by permission of Dover Publications, Inc..
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