iSculpt.org

It seems somehow criminal that I've been writing this blog for six months and I've never done a posting on Rodin. I mean, if you asked me to pick a "favorite" sculptor, I would have a really hard time. It depends on a lot of factors, including my mood. But, if I were to assemble a list of my favorite five or ten sculptors, one who would consistently be on my list is François Auguste René Rodin.

I know, he seems like an easy and obvious choice. I mean, everybody knows who Rodin is, even though people generally don't know much about sculpture or sculptors. How many ordinary people know who Bernini or François Rude were? How about Polykleitos, Phidias, or Praxiteles? And really, it's not even worth asking most non-artists about lesser known sculptors like Per Hasselberg or Carpeaux.

But everybody knows two sculptors: Michelangelo and Rodin. If you ask most people to name a sculpture, they are going to pick the Thinker, The Kiss or, of course, the David. I'll deal with Michelangelo in another post, but I have long felt a sense of kinship with Rodin because of his attitude toward the body, his eager embracing of new technology, and his go-to-hell personality. I also happen to feel that his fame is well deserved.

Now, well-deserved fame does not mean he was infallible even as an artist, and let's not even get into his personal life except to say that it is unlikely that anyone will ever nominate Rodin for a Best Father or Best Husband award. Rodin's later life was filled was some amazing artistic innovation, but also tremendous arrogance. He suffered the fate of many artists who experience great success during their lifetime: He began to believe what people said about him. He got to the point where he would ship bronzes off to clients without even chasing the seams; he would recycle and have cast half-finished pieces and people would rave over how innovative it was that he left tool marks in and did not sculpt the details. You can find books to this day that make excuses for the fact that he threw out unfinished work for easy money. In a way, you can almost trace the modern notion of the avant-garde artist back to Rodin.

But, let's not dwell on those flaws; many of them are understandable considering where he came from, the poverty that he suffered through, and the eventual fame and riches he acquired. I think few of us would do better handling that level of fame and riches under the same circumstances. I mean, it's really hard to grasp today just how famous he was. A sculptor now would never acquire that level of fame by virtue of being a sculptor. His funeral in Meudon was standing-room-only and was attended by a great many dignitaries and other important figures of the day.

Rodin was prolific, and it's really a shame that people aren't familiar with more of his works. My personal favorite piece of his is the Danäid.

This is a work that has to be seen in real life to be appreciated. I saw a cast of it for the first time when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area. I don't remember which museum it was - perhaps the Legion of Honor Museum. It wasn't a marble version like the picture above, but a fairly late bronze cast with a gorgeous black patina. I was spellbound by the effect of the piece. The anatomy was flawless and the surface was so shiny it looked molten. As I moved, it would catch light in completely different ways, revealing subtle nuances of the form that I hadn't noticed before. No photograph can do this piece justice. I didn't want to stop looking at it had a strong urge to reach out and touch it.

Another thing I realized during that visit is that not only do pictures not do the Danäid justice, but that nearly all photographs of it are taken from a, shall we say, "discrete" angle. Rodin, unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries and predecessors, had absolutely no qualms about sculpting detailed genitals, and honestly didn't understand why that was a problem. As he got more famous, he had less reason to conform to other people's sensibilities, but even early on he was prone to doing much more detailed sculpting with little regard for contemporary standards of modesty. Other examples of this are the Andromeda, Women Damned, and Ecclesiastes.

Early on, Rodin was often forced to add fig leafs to his sculptures when entering them into a salon or otherwise exhibiting his works; he only grudgingly covered any part of the body, and despised sculpting clothed figures at all (ironically, though, the clothed Burgers of Calais is one of his most powerful and moving pieces).

In Rodin's later career, he took this fascination with the body to further extremes, and for many people then and now, these more explicit works ("explicit" by the standards of the day) such as the Iris and a handful of life drawings define him as an artist and a person.

The funny thing is that out of a corpus of thousands of works, his "explicit" works consist of just ten drawings and a single sculpture (two if you include the Ecclesiastes), and only one of those drawings was overtly sexual, the rest were just nudes, albeit ones where the genitals were more prominent than was typical at the time.

A few exploratory pieces really shouldn't define Rodin and certainly shouldn't mask his true genius, which was in capturing motion and in conveying emotion. While his Iris is, perhaps, uncomfortably shameless, it's not particularly arousing. On the other hand, many of Rodin's more "acceptable" works, like the Fugit Amor, Eternal Idol, and Fallen Angel are very sensual because they manage to convey to the viewer exactly what the figures are feeling. You can sense the desire the figures have for each other and feel the passion in a way that's completely absent from the Iris or any of his "scandalous" drawings.

Even the popular Kiss smolders in a way that has absolutely nothing to do with its nudity. Those figures could be fully clothed and there would still be no confusion about what they are feeling or where this embrace will lead. Thankfully they weren't sculpted that way because it's hard to imagine it being as effective with them wearing overalls and spats.

Anyway, that's about all the Rodin I have time for today. While there is some good Rodin information on the Web, you really should do yourself a favor and see his works in real life. You'll appreciate them in a whole new way if you've only seen pictures before.