Steinberg - Rodin the Modernist, part 2

These are two concluding sections of Leo Steinberg’s essay on Rodin, written for the catalog of a 1963 exhibition and subsequently revised.

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ASSEMBLAGE AND GRAFT

Rodin modeled incessantly. Energy-that excess flowing out at the fingertips, which drives some hands to drumming the table-kept him proliferating his race of figments till a thousand plasters lined and littered his ateliers. His studio practice, described by assistants, suggests a shop of ceaseless large-scale production. It is as if the labor only began after a figure was done. Rodin had modeled it whole, loosely, as if by improvisation. Then his custom was to multiply it in a score of casts from the same mold, most of which he dismembered. Or else he cast the figure in sections and repeated some of the sections alone. Each operation fed into the quarry of fragments around him, and he spent his maturing years amidst the heaping accumulation of varisized figures, limbs, torsos. and heads-his giblets he called them-a reservoir of readymades and self-made objets trouvés, which worked for him as the idioms and syllables of a language work for a poet: they envelop him, invade his mind, and begin to think in his stead. 

 Steinberg is fascinated by how the man works, but is mute here concerning the results.

Rodin,  Monument to Victor Hugo

Rodin. ,  Constellation

Rodin ,  Crucifixion with Mary Magdalen

 

None of the above images convinces me that assemblage was an especially good idea - except, perhaps, for experimentation.

Also - I suspect that it was practiced in the commercial studios where Rodin once worked. They probably had many drawers full of heads and other body parts to use as needed. Why model a new foot if you already have one the right size ? Time is money.

One figure from the lintel of the Gates of Hell(1882)-a stocky nude dragged on by her own falling head-places herself behind the seated Victor Hugo as the Inner Voice (1885-86). Released from his monument, with cradled arms that suggest self-concealment, and finally without arms at all, she becomes Meditation. The same figure, still bereft of arms, appears as "Beauty" in a drawing for Bau-delaire's Fleurs du mal (1888). Carved in stone (by an assistant), with legs turned to fishtail, she becomes La Sirine, pressed against a crucifix, the Magdalen. Finally, free-standing again, with arms opened and another nude floated against her, she enters a bronze group (in marble by 1902) called Constellation.

Rodin, Prodigal Son

This appears to be more of a eureka moment (I've just found gold !!!) than the contrition of a wayward son.  But I'm doubting Rodin knew much about that sentiment. Like this figure, Rodin  was a very strong guy, though his strength was in modeling muscles, not having them. It's kind of monstrous - as well as inspirational.  Like Picasso paintings.

Rembrandt's painting is what I associate with this theme, but as it turns out, several figure sculptures address it as well.

Charlie Mackesy, b. 1962

Perhaps it really is a better idea to start with a theme and then make a sculpture, than to start with amputated fragments and then search for a theme.

(though the above son looks like he came home as a corpse)

Thereafter, Rodin's most serious work imports mechanism into the body; or rather, the sentient, organic element is stunned by the intrusion of the mechanical, the uncooperating, the alien. The Prodigal Son throws arms up to heaven, and the load upon his frail body is crushing because those uplifted arms are not organically his own, but oversized and a burden to lift. 

Rodin, Ugolino on the Gates of Hell

I was dismayed by the Gates in person 50 years ago, and now by these photos as well.

It’s a mess.

T

Ugolino's dying son in the lifesize group at Meudon lies on his back, and his groin shows the jarring misfit of an alien leg. In the definitive version for the Gates (lifesize bronze in the park of the Paris Museum) the figure turns over so that this harsh maladjustment is lost to sight. But the misfit principle is retained for the groping arms. They are wrongly plugged in at the joints, so that paralysis creeps down from their very shoulders; the strength of gesture in them suffices only for dying away 

I’m guessing this is a manipulation, not a graft. Rodin wanted to disrupt the symmetry of the entire body, so he twisted in the arm.

The resulting mangled wrist is not very satisfying - but hey - this is a study, right?

The great nude Jean d'Aire clasps the key of Calais, but his pronated left hand is not tuned to a corresponding rotation of arm. The left arm intrudes rigidly between hand and shoulder; it suggests a separation of will and body, or a breakdown in nervous transmission. 

The right hand is so crude, it could have been modeled in a few minutes. 

What was the point of grafting it?

Balzac, in one awesome standing nude study, plies his right hand like an unruly tool; it is not his body's hand, of course, but a crude graft.  The limb wrongly fitted is one of Rodin's devices for looking it in its task. 

Once again, I’m doubting this arm was grafted instead of twisted.

The arm of the Tragic Muse in the Victor Hugo monument is so wrenched at the shoulder, and hence so incapable of potential play, that it can only twist itself, as it does here, into a canopy for the poet's head. To such an arm, the prerogative of organic limbs to exercise varied functions seems forever denied. The effect is an equation of body with one instant exertion, an intensified suddenness, and a hint of piston-rod specialization in the function of limbs. All these inorganic intrusions, though no more than a hint, draw their poignancy from the sharp discord they throw into the general

All these inorganic intrusions, though no more than a hint, draw their poignancy from the sharp discord they throw into the general illusion of life. Is it possible that these misfits are due only to impatient haste, that they reflect no positive artistic intention? Hardly. The same Tragic Muse, for instance, has two superposed necks of decreasing diameter, of which the upper supports a distinctly small head. Were this no more than a trial sketch, such an accident could be written off. But Rodin had the figure cast in this form; then enlarged in this form; and finally, still with its goitered look, carved in stone. The question is not whether he noticed these miscarried grafts but, since he took pains to preserve them, what role they play. sion; it refers Rodin's model change in midstream to an old academic tradition, to Zeuxis or Raphael who, we are told, used to combine the best parts of various models since no one body in nature seemed perfect enough. Rodin very probably felt the reverse. The natural body before him was altogether too perfect, too coherent and simple to give a true reflection of what it is to be human. Rodin's human body may be a fissured whole, or an agglutination of disparate, even incongruous parts. An unpredictable alternation of organic joints and abrupt disjunctions lends his great original works a charge of desperate, jerky energy, or suggests tragic exposure to forces both outside and within to which the will has no access. And, as a corollary, those works which, like the nude Balzac studies, express a triumphant will-for them to maintain their body's cohesion is work all-absorbing, the kind of intrinsic work that goes on perpetually in a closed fist. 

From an old humanist point of view, Rodin's figures suggest loss of wholeness, of classic serenity or self-possession. From a political viewpoint they are plainly unfit to serve as public monuments. They are too troubled, too private, and too perilously exposed to uncer-tainty. They imply that all cohesion is hybrid; that the association of a hand with a wrist, of an ill-fitting thigh with a loin, of a figure with its supporting base, a body with a repeat of itself, a child with its mother, or a man with a maid-that all are equally provisional and episodic. 

Wholeness may be the default human condition at birth, but beyond that it’s a personal, family, community achievement.  It’s always vulnerable and eventually, of course, all things die and disintegrate. Entropy doesn’t need to be celebrated - it will happen anyway.

 But they imply also that a sculptor's themes, whether or not derived from the human, are the stuff of imaginative manipulation. It is now becoming apparent that the reign of the classic anatomical figure in our sculptural tradition was more effectively subverted by the onslaught of Rodin's art than by the abstractions that followed.

Did Rodin’s grafting really have any effect at all  on Classical practice?   WWII seems to have  been much more responsible for its decline.

 Or, to put it another way, the implications of Rodin's work, misunderstood by his would-be disciples, Desbois and Bourdelle, were fully grasped only by Brancusi and the sculptor Matisse.

Bourdelle, Great Warrior of Montalban, 1898-1900

Bourdelle, Heracles Archer, 1909

Quite a progress from the earlier piece.

Desbois, Leda , 1891

More anatomy than form.

Feels exhausted.

Desbois, torso,1934

The holding museum relates this to the truncated figures of Rodin as well as the Belvidere torso at the Vatican.  This photo, however, does not suggest that to me.

Matisse, decorative figure, 1908, 28 “

Ann Temkin: We think today of the word "decoration" in a derogatory way, like "oh, that's decorative." The decorative arts, such as textiles or ceramics, have always had a subsidiary ranking to painting and sculpture. Also, the decorative arts have been linked with women. Matisse wanted to upend that. He used that word "decorative" in a very specific way. It was something artistic, imaginary, creative. And part of his goal with his art was to decorate and make the world more beautiful.

That’s reading an awful lot into a piece that feels too casual to be worth the trouble.

Matisse, Tiara, 1930,  8 x 7”

The background here is that Rodin, Desbois, and Bourdelle collaborated on running a sculpture school where Matisse was briefly  a student. It didn’t last very long.

I wish Steinberg had elaborated on this discussion.  Desbois and Bourdelle seem close to Rodin in different ways, while Rodin’s connection to Matisse and Brancusi is puzzling.

Is it just that Matisse and Brancusi ended up being  more canonical to Modernism?

SCULPTURE ITSELF

Rodin's ability to recreate the semblance of elastic flesh never left him; witness some of his later portraits, the Hanako  or the Mrs. Russell . But these are of wax, and the illusion they convey of a lucent skin surface is the quality of the wax used 

Isn’t “elastic flesh” more important to a wax museum than an art museum?

One of many sketches Rodin made of this performer.

Like all sketches, quickly made, quickly experienced.

Floating in a cloud,

belongs in an indoor garden 

Aurora

Lifeless, but nice and dreamy

My favorite of these portraits

A strong, gentle spirit here.

Lady Sackville-West,  1914

But I also like this one, so fresh and alive,

like she just breezed through the front door.

Feels so much like Renoir.

 There are also a number of marble portraits which are better than mechanic translations from the original plaster or bronze. They seem to have been conceived both for the stone and for execution by a chosen assistant, a praticien who excelled in smooth carving. Such are the Puvis de Chavannes, the Lady Warwick, and the Lady Sackville-West of 1914.   In these carvings the definitions are softly veiled so as to suggest things seen through a haze. In so far as the aim of these carvings is portraiture, their treatment invests the sitters with remoteness and reverie. But no one can escape the impression that the true aim is to trace the affinity of white marble for light, so that even in the averted planes shadows seem to slip from surfaces too smooth to retain them. These works seem to be about marble as those others are about wax.

You have only to look at multiple bronzes taken from the same piece to see that the casting process is not just mechanical.  So much depends on who is touching up the intermediary wax.  They are no less artists than the musicians in a classical ensemble.

 Rodin's preferred material is bronze. But after the scandal aroused by the Age of Bronze, with its outright illusion of nakedness, his bronzes tend increasingly to forbid the analogy with smooth human flesh. Thenceforth, though they refer to humanity, they refer as intensely to the metal in its cold or heated state. Beginning with the St. John,  Rodin's modeling grows more emphatic, male flesh is treated as a rutted terrain, the leaps from elevation to trough become steeper, the transitions metal-edged. 

In his greatest work, for example the head of Jean d'Aire,  the abrupt crags and hollows give a palpable materiality to the substance-somewhat as the deeply embrasured portals of Romanesque churches gave perceptible depth and density to the mass of the wall. Flesh of augmented hardness is one departure; another is the flesh resolved into flux. Form, for Rodin, is conceivable as a viscous flow that melts and reconstitutes itself before our eyes. 

A good description of this kind of sculpture - not especially unique to Rodin.

He makes the musculature of a torso seethe like blistering lava, so that the strength conveyed is not in the likeness of muscle, nor in athletic movement alone, but in the more irresistible material energy of liquefaction. Solid or molten-these are the modes of bronze and plaster, not those of flesh. Henceforth, Rodin's best sculpture is about the materials of which it is made. 

Not sure this is true even for what Steinberg  calls Rodin’s best sculpture.  I think his very best, the standing bodies and heads of aging men, are about that ancient Roman idea of indomitable masculinity that was also broadcast by that stalwart of the academy, David.

 It is also about the process of making them. In the Age of Bronze no part of the sculpture varied from any other in perfection of finish. In most of his subsequent works Rodin straddles the state of perfection by leaving them either unfinished or damaged. 

When he went from finish to power of effect, perfection stopped being an issue.

He is the first whose sculpture deliberately harnessed the forces of accident. It began, he tells us, with the mask of the Man with Broken Nose, his early masterpiece of 1863, which became a mask only by accident (Fig. 259). The jury of the 1864 Salon rejected it. But for Rodin it predicted an eventual pattern of partnership with disaster and chance, of watching the accidental and letting accident write the work's story. "Chance," he wrote in Les Cathedrales, "is a great artist." And again: "More beautiful than a beautiful thing is the ruin of a beautiful thing.* ."

Petit Palace variation

Met variation 

There’s enough energy wrapped up in the modeling to withstand plenty of abuse - but still - abusing great sculpture is an immoral gimmick

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 His most beautiful ruin is the early torso, less than life-size, preserved in magnificent bronze at the Petit Palais, Paris . It is the crucial source work from which grew the St. John of 1878, then the first Walking Man of 1900, finally the monumental L'Homme qui marche of 1906. At first sight the torso is a piece of nostalgic neo-antiquity. But it was made by one who sees antique art in two places at once-that is, in its own orbit, invested with native athletic pride; and in our world, as a scarred relic. Rodin's torso, marvelously straight and compact, meets the highest test of sculptural genius-to make the mere abiding in form a form of wild motion. But the torso is also a wreck, with tears at the shoulders made when the clay was damp, with gouged areas left by broken-off chunks of plaster, and with searing scars and bubbles caused at the foundry. The body's muscular stance ends up as metallic hardness, its compactness as fossilization. Rodin cast the wreck for himself alone, for he never exhibited it. But the pattern of its material ravages, such as the huge square gash at the right pectoral, he preserved like stigmata throughout his life, transplanting them faithfully to his Walking Man. 

PostScript 1971

Really appreciate this postscript as an opportunity to end the examination of both Rodin and Steinberg on a positive note.

Two men I will always associate with my work on Rodin. One is the sculptor Jean Tinguely, with whom I first drove out to Meudon in the summer of 1962. We spent six hours there, wandering singly about the house, the museum, the gardens, and occasionally crossing paths to exchange a few words. 

 At one point I was looking at Rodin's Adam, his most Michel-angelesque figure. It had long been observed that the right hand, with its extended, quivering index, alludes to the life-giving moment in Michelangelo's fresco of the Creation of Man. But I stared at the corresponding arm, curiously twisted from the shoulder down and turning the elbow out as it gropes towards a raised knee Imitating the pose, I felt myself absorbing the impotency which that gesture imposes upon one's body, and I realized that it must be an ancient indicator of death, for the gesture occurs in antique relief representations of Niobids dying, their arms similarly pronated. 

Dying Niobid

 I have since learned that the meaning of this "pronated dead arm," as I decided to call it, is understood by intuition. In the film Bonnie and Clyde (1967) it is the gangster's concluding gesture as he rolls over for the last time. Gunned down and riddled with bullets, Clyde dies like a Niobid. 

the death of Clyde Barrow , Arthur Penn, filmmaker

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But that day in Meudon it occurred to me that Rodin's immediate model for the pronated dead arm must be the dead Christ in Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà-which Rodin describes looking at with deep emotion. 

Michelangelo , Pieta

Michelangelo,  Entombment 

And in that case, the arms of Rodin's First Man span a symbolic passage from birth to death. It was at this moment that Tinguely passed and so, pointing to the ungainly pronation of the Adam's left arm, I said: "Jean, what do you make of that movement? It's incapacitating. Why is it we can twist an arm in that way? What is it for, anatomically?" Rodin's immediate model for the pronated dead arm must be the dead Christ in Michelangelo's Florentine Pietà-which Rodin describes looking at with deep emotion. And in that case, the arms of Rodin's First Man span a symbolic passage from birth to death. It was at this moment that Tinguely passed and so, pointing to the ungainly pronation of the Adam's left arm, I said: "Jean, what do you make of that movement? It's incapacitating. Why is it we can twist an arm in that way? What is it for, anatomically?" He halted and tried it. "It's not a gesture of work," he said. Tried it again: "It's not a gesture of love" Then, straightening up, he said with finality: "Ce n'est pas dans la vie."

I can see that as well.

Some other Adam statues  I’ve rounded up. Couldn’t really find that many 

Antonio Rizzo, 1472

Proud to be man

Tullio Lombardo, 1490-95

Effete, but strong anyway.

He spends too much time trimming his finger nails,

but still, he can probably whup your ass.

Bourdelle

The poor lad asks

“What was I thinking?”

Big strong legs,

brain much smaller

Per Ung, 1989

Detail

You’ve got to delve pretty deep to find recent examples as good as this one. It’s way below the radar of Contemporary Art and Modernism. With sufficient effort, I’m sure many more could be found.

Cody Swanson, b. 1985

Power of form in space sacrificed to melodrama.

Unworthy as ecclesiastic art

until the 19th century.

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All of which  makes me appreciate Rodin’s unique concept  even more. Adam is not rising (Rizzo) and he’s not falling (Per Ung).  He’s transitioning from life to death in an amoral world.

Steinberg has proposed that Adam receives life in the Michelangelo gesture of his right hand, while he surrenders it in the Michelangelo gesture of the left.  Makes sense to me.

At first, I guessed that Rodin was playing around with clay while studying a model and at some point the idea of “Adam” just popped into his mind.

But no - Adam and Eve were meant to crown the Gates of Hell commission from the very start. The statue of Eve is much less impressive.  The standing make nude is Rodin’s forte.

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Regarding the bulk of Rodin’s output, I don’t think we need to take it any more seriously than he did.  As he handed over his sketches, fragments, ruins, and conglomerations to be reproduced in various sizes and materials, his attitude seems to have been “ if you’re willing to buy it, I’m willing to sell it”

Steinberg is credited with establishing this as modern sculpture, and finally I’m inclined to agree. What distinguishes modernity is that there is no higher authority than the market place.