Auguste Rodin. Rainer Maria Rilke

Rodin, Paris.

      The Thinker, 1881.

      Bronze, 71.5 × 40 × 58 cm.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      The Age of Bronze, 1875–1876.

      Bronze, 175.3 × 67.5 × 52.9 cm.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      The Age of Bronze is significant in another sense as well. It marks the birth of gesture in the work of Rodin. This gesture, which would grow and develop with such force and proportion, came forth here like the waters of a spring, running down softly over the body. It awoke in the darkness of earliest times, and seems, as it grows, to run through the breadth of this work as it does through the ages, and to pass far beyond to those who will come. It appears tentatively in the raised arms, arms so heavy that one of the hands comes to rest on the crown of the head. But this hand is not asleep; it is gathering strength. High up on the solitary peak of the brain, it prepares itself for work – for the work of centuries, which has no limit or end. And in the right foot the first step waits. We might describe this gesture as one of the repose enclosed in a hard bud.

      Embers of thoughts and a storm of the will: it opens and John comes out, with those eloquent, agitated arms, and the great bearing of one who feels another coming up from behind. The body of this man is no longer untested: the deserts have scorched him, hunger has racked him, and thirst has sapped his strength. He has come through it all and is hardened. His lean, ascetic body is like a wooden handle, holding the wide fork of his stride. He walks. He walks as if the whole wide world were in him, as if he were apportioning it as he walks. He walks. His arms speak of this walking, and his fingers stretch out, a sign of his stride in the air. This is the first walker in Rodin’s work, but many more would follow.

      There are The Burghers of Calais (pp. 17, 25, 28, 29) setting out on their arduous journey, and all his walkers seem to prepare the way for the great challenging stride of Balzac. But the gestures of standing are developed further as well. The figures withdraw within themselves, curling up like burning paper, growing stronger, more concentrated and vital. Exemplary of this is the figure of Eve, which was originally intended to stand above The Gates of Hell (pp. 9, 14). Her head is sunk deep in the darkness of her arms, which are folded across her chest as if she were freezing. The back is rounded, the neck almost horizontal, and she leans forward as if to listen to her own body, in which a strange future is beginning to stir. It is almost as if the weight of the future burdens this woman’s senses, drawing her down from the abstractness of life and into the deep humble service of motherhood.

      Rodin returns again and again in his nude figures to this turn inward, to this intense listening to one’s own depths. We see it in the extraordinary figure he called Meditation (bronze), and in the unforgettable the Inner Voice (plaster), the softest voice of Victor Hugo’s songs, which is almost concealed by the voice of anger in the monument to the poet. Never before had the human body been so concentrated around its interior, so shaped by its own soul and yet restrained by the elastic power of its blood. And the way the neck rises ever so slightly, stretching to hold the listening head above the distant rush of life, is so impressive and deeply felt that one has a difficult time remembering a gesture as moving or expressive. The arms are noticeably missing. In this case Rodin must have felt them to be too easy a solution to his problem, something not belonging to a body that wished to remain shrouded in itself, without any help from outside.

      The Three Shades, 1880.

      Bronze, 96.6 × 92 × 54.1 cm.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      Jules-Bastien Lepage, 1887.

      Plaster, 176 × 87.5 × 88 cm.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      Bust of the Sculptor Jules Dalou, 1883.

      Bronze, 52.2 × 42.9 × 26.7 cm.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      Georges Clemenceau, 1911.

      Bronze, 50 × 32 × 25 cm.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      One thinks of how Duse, left painfully alone in one of D’Annunzio’s plays, tried to embrace without arms and to hold without hands. This scene, in which her body learned a caress that extended far beyond itself, belongs to the unforgettable moments of her acting career. It conveyed the sense that arms are superfluous, merely decorative effects common among the rich and excessive, which one could cast off in order to be completely poor. At that moment one did not have the sense that she had forfeited something important; rather, she was like someone who has given her cup away in order to drink from the stream, like someone who is naked and still a bit awkward with the depth of the revelation.

      Saint John the Baptist, 1880.

      Bronze.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      The same thing is true of Rodin’s armless statues: nothing essential is missing. Standing before them, one has the sense of a profound wholeness, a completeness that allows for no addition. The notion that they are somehow unfinished does not result from simple observation, but rather from tedious consideration, from the petty pedantry dictating that arms belong to a body, and thus that a body without arms can never be whole. Initially, people objected to the way the Impressionists cut trees off at the edges of paintings, but we quickly adjusted to that. We learned – at least in the world of painting – to see and believe that an artistic whole doesn’t necessarily coincide with the ordinary whole-thing, and that, apart from their agreement, new unities come about, new associations and relations, new equilibriums. It is no different in sculpture. The artist’s task consists of making one thing of many, and a world from the smallest part of a thing. In Rodin’s work there are hands, independent little hands, which are alive without belonging to any single body. There are hands that rise up, irritable and angry, and hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five false heads of Cerberus. There are hands that walk, hands that sleep and hands that wake; criminal hands weighted with the past, and hands that are tired and want nothing more, hands that lie down in a corner like sick animals who know no one can help them. But then hands are a complicated organism, a delta in which life from the most distant sources flows together, surging into the great current of action. Hands have stories; they even have their own culture and their own particular beauty. We grant them the right to have their own development, their own wishes, feelings, moods, and occupations. Rodin knows by way of the training he took upon himself that the body consists solely of scenes of life, a life that can become great and individual in any place, and he has the power to provide any part of this broad, variegated plane with the autonomy and richness of a whole. Just as the human body is a whole for Rodin only insofar as all its limbs and powers respond to one common (inner or outer) movement, so do the parts of various bodies come together of inner necessity to make up a single organism. A hand lying on the shoulder or thigh of another body no longer belongs completely to the one it came from: a new thing arises out of it and the object it touches or grasps, a thing that has no name and belongs to no one, and it is this new thing, which has its own definite boundaries, that matters from that point on.

      Saint John the Baptist, 1880.

      Bronze.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, 1882.

      Terracotta, 48 × 45 × 34 cm.

      Musée Rodin, Paris.

      This vision provides the basis for the grouping of figures in Rodin; from it comes that unprecedented interconnectedness of the figures, that inseparability of the forms, that not letting go, not at any