Rodin. Rainer Maria Rilke

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

      The Kiss is smoothly carved in gleaming white marble, its massive lovers presented as idealised and divinely beautiful protagonists. The Balzac on the other hand, crudely cast in plaster (other versions in bronze and marble were made later), is strikingly unpleasant, with its jagged profiles, rough textures and a more or less complete disregard for anatomical detail, accuracy and finish. In The Kiss, the entwined couple enact a titillating, almost comic encounter. The figures were originally inspired by Dante’s lovers Paolo and Francesca, damned eternally for incest, but here revealing nothing of their awful, poetic fate (Rodin made another, darker version for the doors). It is the woman who has initiated proceedings – while she forthrightly embraces her lover and has moved her right leg over onto his lap, he only tentatively touches her left hip. (In his own love affairs it was usually Rodin who made the running).

      Third Maquette for ‘The Gates of Hell’

      1880

      Plaster, 111.5 × 75 × 30 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      Dante and Virgil or Paolo and Francesca

      c. 1880

      Pencil and ink wash

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      Cavalier Galloping on Horseback, Right Profile

      c. 1880

      Pencil, red ink, red and brown ink, wash on buff paper mounted on support paper, 18.7 × 16 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      The Balzac offers no comparable narrative interest. Veering off the vertical, this enormous, distorted figure twists with terrifying force upwards – more an expression of the writer’s (and the sculptor’s) creative powers than a literal description of Balzac’s physical appearance. ‘A monument, not a monsieur reproduced in stone,’ as Rodin himself put it.

      The Gates of Hell

      1880–1881

      Graphite touched up with pen and ink

      (sketch for the composition), 30.5 × 15.2 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      There is, however, much that the works share. Both have been the subject of scandal and violent disapproval. A slightly earlier version of The Kiss was removed from an exhibition in Chicago in 1893 because the frank nature of the couple’s embrace was considered too candid a sexual prelude for public taste.

      The Thinker

      1880–1881

      Bronze

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      Even as late as 1952 there was strong opposition to the Tate Gallery in London buying a copy for permanent display.

      The Balzac was rejected by the committee who had commissioned it, describing Rodin’s monolith as ‘a shapeless mass, a nameless thing, a colossal foetus.’ Others at the time called it ‘a toad in a sack’.

      The Gates of Hell

      1880–1917

      Bronze, 635 × 400 × 85 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      The novelist Émile Zola and a number of other prominent public figures supported Rodin and petitioned the Parisian authorities to buy it for the city, but to no avail. The controversy was caught up in the explosive political storm then dividing French society: the Dreyfus affair, in which the State stood accused of complicity in anti-Semitic discrimination against a Jewish officer serving in the French army. Those who maintained that the government had acted dishonourably supported Rodin and the two issues were linked in the press.

      Eve

      1881

      Bronze

      The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

      Ugolin

      c. 1881

      Plaster, 41.5 × 40.3 × 58.7 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      However what was probably considered most shocking about the statue was rarely acknowledged. In a preparatory nude study for the piece, which was subsequently cast in bronze as an independent work, Rodin modelled a figure with his hands held together clasping his erect penis. The final Balzac is clothed – draped with a dressing gown that seems to seethe with seismic force. (Balzac, when he wrote, worked sixteen hours a day, ingested vast amounts of tobacco smoke and coffee and wore a dressing gown). But beneath its folds, a prominent bulge suggests strongly that this Balzac seems to be doing exactly the same as his predecessor.

      The Three Shades

      1881

      Bronze, 96.6 × 92 × 54.1 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      Pediment of the Saint-Pierre Abbey

      c. 1881

      Pencil, stump, ink wash and gouache on buff paper, 9.1 × 14.4 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      The Crouching Woman

      c. 1881–1882

      Plaster, 53 × 93.5 × 45 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      Moreover the form of the whole is distinctly phallic. Both sculptures then share, at heart, a dominant sexual motive power. This force is essential to much of Rodin’s art and is mirrored in many of the stories recorded about the man himself. These stories concentrate on his physical presence (despite his small stature), his sexual energy, his hands, his piercing blue eyes and his heavy step.

      Torso of Adèle

      1882

      Plaster, 16 × 50 × 19 cm

      Musée Rodin, Paris

      I Am Beautiful