When is a sculpture not just a sculpture? That it is so intertwined with politics that its initial artistic impulse becomes lost in the quagmire of the partisan. That is what transpired with the sculpture of Honore de Balzac executed by Auguste Rodin fifty years after the writer’s death.
Edward Streichen photo. "in contrast to the gesticulating movements of the Gates of Hell figures, Rodin wanted to express this intellectual dynamism by physical containment. He sculpted a detailed, full-size Balzac, his arms folded defiantly over his portly belly, with his massive head tilted upward in active concentration. Evoking the famous robe that Balzac wore when writing, Rodin draped the completed nude with a plaster-soaked cloth, carefully arranging it both to cover and to reveal the body beneath. The result is extraordinary: a dramatic metaphor of interior thought expressed through the physical. But it was too outlandish for the Society of Letters who were offended by this insult to their hero and refused to accept the finished statue. Their feelings were mirrored in the press. “Never has anyone had the idea of extracting the brain of a man and applying it to his face,” wrote a critic in L’Intransigent (Normand-Romain). The dismissive verdict was final on Balzac’s public appearance. The sculpture remained in its original plaster for forty years, cast in bronze only in 1939, twenty-two years after Rodin’s death. Read more at Suite101: Public Rejection of Rodin's Balzac, Burghers of Calais Sculptures http://www.suite101.com/content/rejection-and-compromise-rodins-balzac-and-burghers-of-calais-a254839#ixzz1EgnqxIUU image: http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/rodn/hd_rodn.htm
The Monument to Balzac originally was commissioned to the sculptor Henri Chapu. When Chapu died in 1891, his work still unfinished, Emile Zola, the new president of Societé des Gens de Lettres, set all wheels in motion so that Rodin was invited as a candidate. Rodin promised to deliver a three meters tall bronze sculpture within 18 months, till January 1893, to be placed at the Palais-Royal in Paris, and was accepted by the Societé. Read More: http://www.rodin-web.org/works/1891_balzac.htm a
Rodin. The Eternal Idol. "His rugged forms flew in the face of the smooth finish and narrative detail so popular in the salons of his time. Often emerging from inchoate masses of matter, Rodin’s muscled humans writhe in torment, his fingerprints still visible on their torsos. When the clay or moulds broke, he preserved the broken pieces, finding that the fragments could convey meaning as complete works of art. " read more: http://www.artistsincanada.com/php/article.php?id=1007 image: http://www.artistsincanada.com/php/article.php?id=1007
The Rodin we know today first had to overcome the handicap if being poor and unknown in a metier headed by the rich and famous. To earn a living he became an ornamental sculptor for the builders who were producing the facades of Baron Hausmann’s new Paris. For nearly twenty years he supported himself as a craftsman in commercial studios or as a “ghost” sculptor for better known artists producing caryatids, statuettes, vases -even sgraffiti on porcelainware at Sevres. He headed to Brussels during the Franco-Prussian war and six years later returned and opened his first studio in an unheated stable in Paris.
Rodin’s first scrape with the scandals of success came with his “The Age of Bronze” in 1877 which was so lifelike he was accused of having cast it from a live model. Rodin, who had worked on the figure for wighteen months was able to disprove the charge and it was bought eventually by the French government. His output became prodigious and his themes evolved; from the commission from “The Gates of Hell” which spawned “The Thinker” and “The Three Shades” among others to softer themes on the fluidity of love became major themes in his work and new ground.
Rodin. Saint John The Baptist. "As I made my way through the galleries of Rodin’s sculptures, I found it hard to concentrate. The bronzes are typically licorice-black and glossy, and strong lighting casts the eye sockets in deep shadow. Monochromatic, bulging and overheated with emotional excess, these statues don’t invite calm contemplation. There is a constant contradiction between the hard surface of the bronze and the intended softness of the human skin. My enjoyment of the beauty of his forms was constantly undermined by Rodin’s intensity of expressive gesture. " read More: http://www.artistsincanada.com/php/article.php?id=1007 image: http://www.vam.ac.uk/images/image/29141-popup.html
Copulative entanglements had previously not been considered suitable subjects for Western sculpture. In such works as “The Kiss” and “Fugit Amour” Rodin demonstrated the symbolic and structural possibilities of tow figures locked in the vectors of erotic embrace. To a public used to subterfuge in art, this was all regarded as exceedingly provocative: muscles and breasts in disturbing presentation, and hips unbound by any retraining garments. At the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, “The Kiss” had to be shown in a separate room, and admission was by invitation only.
These works seemed to categorize Rodin as part of the emerging artistic intelligentsia; the poet sensualists such as Stephane Mallarme, Pierre Louts and Claude Debussey. Rodin’s style and temperament, however, were ot of place in that company of aesthetes. He had a peasant background, was basically conservative, but had the wild streak of the indefatigable sensualist. He continually had nude models, men and women walking about in his studio. He insisted that he could only work if he had a model before him. ” The sight of the human form sustains and stimulates me”.
Balzac. An 1842 daguerreotype that Rodin pronounced "the only faithful likeness" of the novelist
So here, he was, and it is hard to determine if he was delaying the project and its completion on purpose. Caught between a desire to antagonize and provoke while at the same time involved in genuine creation. He seemed to enjoy the controversy while managing to move closer to a defintive version of the subject. Finally, a full-size plaster version of the statue was shown to the public at the Salon of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1898. “The enlarged version, exhibited at the 1898 Salon at the Champ des Mars , provoked a scandal fueled by the conservatives. The sculpture was associated with an erected phallus; other reactions interpreted the ‘Balzac’ as Narcissus, masturbating under his protecting coat, or as a “colossal foetus”, a “German larva”, or simply as a “heap of plaster”. Read More: http://www.rodin-web.org/works/1891_balzac.htm
Unfortunately, for Rodin, his Balzac has become entangled in the Dreyfus Affair, the story of the Jewish captain being shuttled off to Devil’s Island for a crime he did not commit.Zola had published “J’Accuse” and most of the Left and the intelligentsia supported Zola against the militant defenders of the status quo; most of the supporters of Rodin’s Balzac were identifiable Dreyfusards.
---Artists like Degas, Matisse, Henri Laurens, and Picasso, to name but a few, were profoundly indebted to Rodin’s radicalism, his ability to find sculptural forms to express inward psychological states. “Rodin,’’ as Steinberg wrote, “restored to inward experience what had been for at least a century a branch of public relations.’’--- Read More: http://www.boston.com/ae/theater_arts/articles/2011/02/15/rodins_balzac_sculpture_at_the_risd_museum_of_art/ image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wallyg/1384165995/
Rodin was in the awkward position that his admirers, who tried to collect FF 30,000 to purchase his refused ‘Balzac Monument’ and put it at a public space, were mainly supporters of the imprisoned Jewish officer Dreyfus. In his open letter J´accuse, Zola had taunted the military leaders with a conspiracy against the innocent captain. Zola was summoned to court and condemned; the confrontation between the left-wing intellectuals and the conservative forces split the French nation. The association between Zola and Rodin may have been one of the reasons the ‘Balzac Monument’ was meeting so much resistance. But Rodin, unwilling to provoke the reigning powers, remained silent and refused to put his name under Mirbeau’s manifest to support Zola, so that Jean Ajalbert scolded the stubborn sculptor for cowardice. In fact, Rodin was politically much more conservative than he admitted in public. The Norwegian author and painter Christain Krohg, who visited Rodin at that time, complained: “Rodin is a glowing anti-Dreyfusard and anti-Semite…”. Read More: http://www.rodin-web.org/works/1891_balzac.htm
ADDENDUM:
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/not-about-the-money.php?page=all
http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/Rodin-A-Biography-Frederic-V-Grunfeld/9780306808265-item.html?cookieCheck=1
Rodin was a late Romantic. His subject is the human condition, as expressed in a fleshy and muscular presentation of suffering: what has been called “the sweep of the human tragedy”. Human tragedy is what The Thinker is thinking about, as he sits on the lintel of the massive Gates of Hell. Above him The Three Shades, heads and arms hanging down, preside over our swirling doom. In this project Rodin was inspired by Ghiberti’s doors for the Baptistry in Florence. While Ghiberti created The Gates of Paradise (1425-52), Rodin’s attitude was almost entirely downcast.
Can we deduce anything from Rodin’s nature? Like Picasso, he was a short man, just 5 foot 4 inches tall and notably shortsighted. He was certainly a sensualist. His first model was a woman of “the physical vigour of a peasant’s daughter” who bore his only child and modelled for him long into the night. During the coming years, she was set aside while he pursued his “countless affairs”, though she stuck with him. He married her 50 years later, one month before her death. ( Robert Amos ) Read More: http://www.artistsincanada.com/php/article.php?id=1007
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