Constellation of epiphanies by Rajesh Sharma
Ever since I had read the great French poet Rainer Maria Rilke's book on Auguste Rodin, I had yearned to see the great sculptor's work. The opportunity came this July when I went to San Francisco.
It was an afternoon. After spending a few hours in the de Young museum, we took a cab to reach the Legion of Honor, the museum that has one of the richest collections of Rodin outside France.
I expected to see a treasure. What I saw was a constellation of epiphanies.
It all began with The Thinker, Rodin's signature sculpture, originally intended to adorn his Gates of Hell. Sitting under the sky on a pedestal in the museum's vast courtyard, the self-absorbed Thinker welcomes by ignoring you. He is weighed down by thought. As you watch him, his burden begins to weigh down on you.
The Thinker is a man thinking to his ends, from the caked hair on the head down to the clenched toes. Rodin acknowledges the toes' right to gesture: they aren't just there passive and remote, but express – the pressure showing – the strife of thought. They grip the earth while thought beats its wings to ascend and soar away.
It was an afternoon. After spending a few hours in the de Young museum, we took a cab to reach the Legion of Honor, the museum that has one of the richest collections of Rodin outside France.
I expected to see a treasure. What I saw was a constellation of epiphanies.
It all began with The Thinker, Rodin's signature sculpture, originally intended to adorn his Gates of Hell. Sitting under the sky on a pedestal in the museum's vast courtyard, the self-absorbed Thinker welcomes by ignoring you. He is weighed down by thought. As you watch him, his burden begins to weigh down on you.
The Thinker is a man thinking to his ends, from the caked hair on the head down to the clenched toes. Rodin acknowledges the toes' right to gesture: they aren't just there passive and remote, but express – the pressure showing – the strife of thought. They grip the earth while thought beats its wings to ascend and soar away.
The whole body – a splendour of shape and intricate musculature – is beating with thought. Like all of it were thought's heart. The face, freed from the burden of having to solely express the events inside, doesn't eclipse the body. In this astonishing portrait, the body is a theatre. Total theatre.
Rodin's figures reveal their character in their postures and gestures, and in the texture of their surfaces. The bodies are landscapes of consciousness. In The Thinker you can see and touch a Hamlet, and glimpse his unfathomable mystery. Character as a visual, tactile presence, its mystery inviolate.
Paul Gsell, the master's apprentice, recounts how Rodin once asked him if he had seen Greek sculpture by the light of a lamp and then showed him the mysterious surface of an antique replica of the Venus di Medici that the daylight doesn't allow to be seen. Gsell was stunned by the 'astonishing complexity' and 'detail' of the stone work that made it feel like flesh.
John the Baptist, another male nude, is a lean, athletic figure – upper rib cage looking through the flesh, a slight hump in the left of the back, the left shoulder anticipating the next step and already ahead of the chest – compared to the large-limbed, muscular and powerful Thinker. He has walked over land and sea and seems poised, in the sculpture's timeless instant, in the very heart of movement. The paradoxical poise is a miracle seen by a master artist's imagination in its creative freedom: both feet firmly planted, the advancing right leg unbent at the knee, the left knee with just a hint of a bend. The right index finger is raised diagonally and curls as much heavenward as toward himself. The left points downward. With lips parted and eyes radiant with thought, the whole face speaks of earth-born transcendence, of things that bind heaven and earth. It is energy become matter, matter becoming energy.
The sculpture demonstrates what Aristotle, in Poetics, terms as probable impossibility: dramatic plot realised in space instead of in time. Why, it's time rendered in space – a succession of instants so integrated in a single gesture that artistic truth achieves radiant plausibility against nature's truth. This was Rodin's way of creating a sense of movement in sculpture, a secret he discloses to Gsell. While the movement is horizontal in this figure, it is vertical in The Age of Bronze, unfolding in waves from the legs up to the arms.
Rodin's figures reveal their character in their postures and gestures, and in the texture of their surfaces. The bodies are landscapes of consciousness. In The Thinker you can see and touch a Hamlet, and glimpse his unfathomable mystery. Character as a visual, tactile presence, its mystery inviolate.
Paul Gsell, the master's apprentice, recounts how Rodin once asked him if he had seen Greek sculpture by the light of a lamp and then showed him the mysterious surface of an antique replica of the Venus di Medici that the daylight doesn't allow to be seen. Gsell was stunned by the 'astonishing complexity' and 'detail' of the stone work that made it feel like flesh.
John the Baptist, another male nude, is a lean, athletic figure – upper rib cage looking through the flesh, a slight hump in the left of the back, the left shoulder anticipating the next step and already ahead of the chest – compared to the large-limbed, muscular and powerful Thinker. He has walked over land and sea and seems poised, in the sculpture's timeless instant, in the very heart of movement. The paradoxical poise is a miracle seen by a master artist's imagination in its creative freedom: both feet firmly planted, the advancing right leg unbent at the knee, the left knee with just a hint of a bend. The right index finger is raised diagonally and curls as much heavenward as toward himself. The left points downward. With lips parted and eyes radiant with thought, the whole face speaks of earth-born transcendence, of things that bind heaven and earth. It is energy become matter, matter becoming energy.
The sculpture demonstrates what Aristotle, in Poetics, terms as probable impossibility: dramatic plot realised in space instead of in time. Why, it's time rendered in space – a succession of instants so integrated in a single gesture that artistic truth achieves radiant plausibility against nature's truth. This was Rodin's way of creating a sense of movement in sculpture, a secret he discloses to Gsell. While the movement is horizontal in this figure, it is vertical in The Age of Bronze, unfolding in waves from the legs up to the arms.
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Emerging from sheer rock that has in its shape hints of the wave and the oyster shell, Rodin's marble bust of Victor Hugo blossoms from the limits of form. Here is art as cosmos awaking from chaos. Nature as art's matrix: part of Hugo's forehead is stone left unfinished, a remainder of the matrix, a promise of the unthought. The work illuminates the artist's spiritual bond with matter, whose rawness and intractability he must leave yet always live in, must transcend and yet recreate. Given up to the freedom of perpetual metamorphosis, the artist becomes in its becoming. He must return forever to the edges, gaze far over them for other horizons, undo himself and form himself anew in making art. Here is a sculptor's tribute to a story-teller, one for whom language was the stuff of formative performance. Rodin gave language to stone and metal, to alloy and plaster; Hugo brought to language their hardness and music, their malleability and breathing porosity.
Was Rodin, in making his Hugo and Balzac (that rock erupting into human form) forging mirrors for himself? The inseparability of form and not-form, it seems, never ceased to intrigue and inspire him. Perhaps it was while watching Rodin at work that Rilke began to dream of dwelling beyond boundaries.
Eve's flesh looks scarred and blemished – such is the texture of the plaster Rodin chose to make her of. She doesn't have the clear marble flesh of a Greek or Roman goddess. She is human –alert, thoughtful, self-conscious, probably fearful, but certainly not ashamed. She is covering and caressing her flesh at once.
Rodin lights up her half-hidden face with an ambivalent emotion between dread and joy.
The Burghers of Calais is a theatre of terminal, extreme gestures. The five men (in place of six in the original work) are walking to their execution (which they don't expect to not happen). Foreheads, eyes, chins, jaws, lips, shoulders, necks, arms, hands, feet, legs, ears, skin, hair, the clothing – as if each knows its fate. Rodin rescues heroism and martyrdom from the romantic traditions of mythification. Self-sacrifice too has its portions of fear, anguish and despair. After all, the hero's humanity makes self-sacrifice meaningful. And dreadful.
You may walk to your death together, but you die alone. Each Burgher has a singular inner world which his expression, posture and gesture convey in a final flare of sheer individuality, in his way of going to die, in the degree of his despair, indifference, fear, or defiance. Rodin thus undoes the disgrace and dehumanisation meant to hang in the ropes around the men's necks, and affirms the indestructible freedom of each to be human.
Rodin lights up her half-hidden face with an ambivalent emotion between dread and joy.
The Burghers of Calais is a theatre of terminal, extreme gestures. The five men (in place of six in the original work) are walking to their execution (which they don't expect to not happen). Foreheads, eyes, chins, jaws, lips, shoulders, necks, arms, hands, feet, legs, ears, skin, hair, the clothing – as if each knows its fate. Rodin rescues heroism and martyrdom from the romantic traditions of mythification. Self-sacrifice too has its portions of fear, anguish and despair. After all, the hero's humanity makes self-sacrifice meaningful. And dreadful.
You may walk to your death together, but you die alone. Each Burgher has a singular inner world which his expression, posture and gesture convey in a final flare of sheer individuality, in his way of going to die, in the degree of his despair, indifference, fear, or defiance. Rodin thus undoes the disgrace and dehumanisation meant to hang in the ropes around the men's necks, and affirms the indestructible freedom of each to be human.
The burghers stand on disproportionally large feet. The way they are is monumental, like Mary's lap is with the body of her son, in Michelangelo's Pietà.
Rodin again melts form in the perspectival transfiguration he accomplishes in The Sculptor and His Muse. The sculptor is wielding the Muse on his left hand, which the Muse holds in hers – shoring it up so that the man can hold and endure the gift. The two hands, huge, loom over the spectator. The sculptor's right hand covers his mouth to bury a cry of astonishment, the brow is riven with wrinkles, the eyes – like Cezanne's on his deathbed – leap out to see. Rodin used to say, the thing an artist most needs is learning how to see. The heads merge in a swirl of hair.
Rodin again melts form in the perspectival transfiguration he accomplishes in The Sculptor and His Muse. The sculptor is wielding the Muse on his left hand, which the Muse holds in hers – shoring it up so that the man can hold and endure the gift. The two hands, huge, loom over the spectator. The sculptor's right hand covers his mouth to bury a cry of astonishment, the brow is riven with wrinkles, the eyes – like Cezanne's on his deathbed – leap out to see. Rodin used to say, the thing an artist most needs is learning how to see. The heads merge in a swirl of hair.
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It seems the hands obsessed Rodin. Of his numerous studies in plaster, a few are displayed in this museum. The Mighty Hand, in spite of its title and its impression of enormous practiced force, looks stubby-fingered – though it is not. Is this half-clenched hand the master's own – of the artist who tells himself he could only go so far? There's something exuberant and comically grotesque in this work, as in Balzac. Is Rodin laughing before his limits? Does the hand that mirrored the world and caught its soul also mirror the artist and catch his soul for himself?
Reference
Gsell, Paul. Art by Rodin. Trans. Romilly Fedden. Small, Maynard and Company, Boston, 2017.
Reference
Gsell, Paul. Art by Rodin. Trans. Romilly Fedden. Small, Maynard and Company, Boston, 2017.
An essayist, critic and translator, Rajesh Sharma teaches literature in Punjabi University, Patiala. He has published six books. Re-reading Aristotle’s Poetics (Copper Coin) appeared in 2021. His forthcoming book is Pash and Dil: Critical Essays and Translations.
