When Augustus Rodin’s contemporaries in
painting were transcending naturalism to ring in modernity in painting, he was literally
chiselling away habits of classicism to push sculpture to modernity. Sculpture,
by definition, has a brute materiality about it. This materiality helped prolonging
the grand themes of classicism – stability, mythical subjects and a condensed
other worldliness – longer than, say, painting or music. It fell on Rodin to
bring in movement, fleeting moments, unfinished surfaces, in other words –
‘embrace of ambiguity’ through ‘ a conflicted allegiance to grandiosity and
intimacy.’
Rodin has been labled as grandiose,
ostentatious and even corny. His reputation dipped immediately after his death
in 1917 when the new breed of sculptor (many of whom worked under him eg..
Maillol, Brancusi, Bourdelle, Pompon etc.) started preferring ‘meaningful
Canons of form & Vision’ over Rodin’s searing emotions expressed by hyper
detailing. While benefitting from Rodin’s paving of the way from classical
themes, they focused their own voices on achieving a less detailed or
complicated form, reaching core in a quieter way. Today, however, Rodin stands
a undisputed harbinger of modernity in sculpture, often compared to
Michelangelo in impact and stature.
His ‘anti-monumentalism’ was a natural
corollary of his stubborn rejection of completeness. In ‘Les Bourgeois de Calais’, a depiction of six wealthy citizens of the
French town who offered themselves to the attcaking army for execution as a
price for safety of their fellow citizens, the moment that Rodin chose to
depict was neither the surrender nor the execution (which never took place) but
a moment when they were alone after the spark of initial heroism had passed.
The art work is not recreating a landmark moment but a void with a promise of
movement and uncertainty. Doom, despair and surrender to fate is still a work
in progress before getting to its horrible, chaotic finality.
This rejection of completeness reached
a new level during his mature years in works like hands or head less torsos.
These disembodied works left scope for possibilities. The telos, the final
cause remained hidden but, quite clearly, the moving force in this melee of
incompleteness. A moving force propelled by entropy and renewal. Robert Hughes
found in these incomplete figures ‘expressive power of the non-finito’ and
savage force of the human form to express emotion. Hughes wrote “his use of the
"partial figure"—the headless striding man, the ecstatically capering
figure of Iris, Messenger of the Gods—went beyond such conventions as the body
not yet released from its mass of raw stone, or even the broken antique
fragment. It was a way of asserting the power of reduction, a demonstration
that the expressive power of human form could be so concentrated as to drop,
without loss, such usual signifiers of emotion as the head.” Incompleteness is
a sure indicator of movement. This kinetic fuel is another hallmark of the
break that Rodin effected from stable unmoving glory of classicism. Unfinished
conundrum of Iris, Messenger of
the Gods or Walking
Man and his distinctive musculature created tension in his stones or bronze
that signified movement. Talking about the this kinetic appeal in the ‘Walking
Man’ Peter Schjendahl of The New Yorker wrote “Walking becomes lurching. The effect is
simple, but it electrifies as the sign of an intelligence that comprehends, and
can gainfully subvert, the fictive language of figuration in sculpture. You
get, in a flash, that Rodin could have played no end of Picasso-like games with
givens of the medium, had he been more of a sophisticate.”
While his transmogrifying and cross
feeding sculpture reminded of Picasso’s inventiveness, his most potent
playfield was flesh - the surface. Rodin said “to any artist worthy of the
name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all
extension truth, read there, as is an open book, all the inner truth”. There he
is closest to great British artist Lucian Freud, for whom flesh was ‘mound of feelings’. This fascination with
speaking flesh has brought forth a sexual frankness in both Freud’s and Rodin’s
work. While Freud kept on working the texture and tone his model’s flesh,
Rodin’s surfaces are his most thoroughly finished incompleteness. Gaping
sexuality of ‘Iris the Messenger of God’ fascinates more by pulsating
coarseness of the texture then its exposed boldness. He achieved a very real
surface for his work. His ideal was captured by Paul Gsell. Rodin when talking
of Venus de Medici, swooned “It is
truly flesh! You would think it moulded by kisses and caresses! You almost
expect, when you touch this body, to find it warm”. This ‘warm’
flesh is one more definitive indicator of his subversion of Classicism, a
period of idealized surfaces. His reputation for eroticism often bordered on
sensational. His quest to recover ‘freedom of instinct’ led to many experimentation
which were even termed ‘exploitative’ use of his models. For Rodin there was no
visual compromise, he sought to avoid stage effect in his nudes. ‘I know why my
drawings have this intensity. It is because I do not intervene. Between nature
and paper, I eliminated talent. I do not reason. I simply let myself go.” Like
Goya, like Picasso and like Matisse, Rodin exemplifies primal force of nature
where talent appears eliminated simply by it all pervasiveness. Rodin is an
undisputed master and his absence for last hundred years has made it clear
beyond any doubt.
Dhiraj, 26 Dec, 2017
Wonderful piece of writing. I never knew the beauty of incompleteness, the force and power behind it. Thanks for introducing Rodin to me and getting to understand this powerful idea of incompleteness being the moving spirit behind his sculptures. Great.
ReplyDeleteRajesh K. Jha