Day 303 - Rodin

June 21, 2022

Gallery 800, the first in a series of galleries devoted to 19th and early 20th century European painting and sculpture, is a revelation to me - and today's visit is yet another humbling experience. The gallery is a long, wide corridor that leads to two sets of special exhibitions galleries, and over the years, I suspect I've walked its length at least 100 times. I'm sure I've noticed Rodin's standing bronze sculpture of Honore' de Balzac - it occupies the middle of the floor, so you can't miss it. And I've noticed a lot of paintings that didn't strike me as very interesting. Today's visit didn't change that assessment of the paintings, many of which depict classical subjects with lots of nudes.  Pretty ho-hum, when you consider that Chardin, Manet, and Degas were these artists' contemporaries.

But somehow I had failed to notice the display cases that line the gallery's walls  and are filled with Rodin statuettes, along with several larger free-standing works by the sculptor in bronze and marble. To be honest, I had never thought much about, or appreciated, Rodin. But today's visit changed all that.  

The works on display offer insights into Rodin's artistic development. The earliest is an utterly vapid head of a bacchante that he made while working as an assistant in a commercial sculptor's studio. Apparently, the experience left him determined not to be subject to external constraints and to give freer rein to his imagination. 

Rodin became the sculptor of emotion, often concerned with expressing the psychological state of his subjects. Some of the images he created are highly erotic. Rodin called the work shown in the first photograph "Eternal Spring," presumably to soften the eroticism, but the name doesn't in the least disguise the content. The polished  nude figures of a nude man and woman emerge from a 3' x 3' block of rough marble. The seated man's right arm encircles the torso of the woman, who kneels before him. He bows his head to kiss her, while she arches backward to receive his kiss, and presumably much more. The figures are young and beautiful (maybe that explains the "Eternal Spring" title?) -  he is well-muscled, her breasts are full, her belly taut. I wonder whether Rodin had models posing for him,  or whether the couple's idealized bodies were carved from the sculptor's imagination.

"Eternal Spring" is arousing but not troubling. The same cannot be said of of a small (perhaps 12" tall) plaster bust Rodin made of his mistress, Rose Beuret. Under her knitted eyebrows, her eyes are cast down, her expression sober and, to my mind, unhappy. As well she might have been: according to the caption, she was an uneducated woman from the provinces who was Rodin's companion for 53 years and bore him a son. Meantime, another caption notes Rodin's 12-year affair with one of his students. and God knows how many other women he was involved with. 

One of the placards, entitled "Rodin's Muses," discusses the sculptor's relationships with women.  Rodin  wrote that "a soft woman is [God's] most powerful messenger," a source of inspiration.  She is "a divine sower who sows the seeds of love in our hearts in order that we can put it back a hundred times in our work." But what, I have to wonder, is "a soft woman?"  A woman who is compliant, adoring, willing to do his bidding, who never questions, who takes care of the mundane stuff so that the artist can devote himself to his art (as well as to fucking)?

In Rodin's case, his small (perhaps 15 inches high) bronze statuette entitled "The Old Courtesan" presents a very different perspective.   The figure was incorporated into a large project, "The Gates of Hell," that occupied a major part of Rodin's life, although the project was never installed as planned. According to the placard, Rodin intended to suggest a moral connection between the courtesan's sin and the ravages of time.  But what I see is an honest - and unsparing - depiction of an old woman's nude body: her sunken chest, shriveled breasts, skinny arms, stringy legs.  In short, I see myself.  And while I am in no way a saint, I'm hardly a sinner.  A little more compassion on Rodin's part would have been appreciated.

Perhaps his "Pygmalion and Galatea," carved from a marble block approximately 4' X 4',  best exemplifies Rodin's view of women. Notably, Rodin presents Pygmalion not as the youth of the classical myth but as a middle-aged, bearded man - namely, himself. On one hand, Pygmalion appears ready to go down on the statue he has created.  But he wants to make love to her precisely because she is his creation. And Galatea certainly looks like the soft woman of Rodin's  desires and dreams.