The father of modern sculpture
Benedict Read
RODIN: A BIOGRAPHY by Frederic V. Grunfeld
Hutchinson, £30
In 1902 a ceremonial dinner was held at the Café Royal in honour of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. After the dinner, Rodin got into his carriage, whereupon students from South Kensington and the Slade detached the horses and themselves pulled Rodin in triumph along to the Arts Club. This must be a unique tribute to an artist in British cultural history — Henry Moore never experienced anything like that — and it symbolises the position Rodin came to occupy in our art thinking: the father of modern sculpture, the man who broke the mould of sclerotic Victorian conventions, who produced a series of images (The Thinker, The Kiss) that are publicly recognisable in a way no other sculptor's are. When the cartoonist Larry published his (superb) Art Collection in 1977, Rodin was easily the most featured individual artist, including as frontispiece his supposed Party Game (ie The Kiss couple playing pass-the-matchbox).
For all that, the Rodin literature in English is surprisingly thin. Specialist coverage has recently increased, especially in America, but the general reader's stand- by has remained for years Denys Sutton's admirable Triumphant Satyr of 1966. There have been problems in writing about Rodin. The French state took over his property (with all the materials therein) in 1916 and it was subsequently closely, not to say jealously, supervised. And while a new spirit inspires the study and care of French 19th-century sculpture — witness the Grand Palais exhibition of 1986 — prob- lems of administering the Rodin empire in an adequate manner, for example, prepar- ing even a basic inventory of the total sculpture holdings, are still causing curato- rial merry-go-rounds.
Against this background Grunfeld's book shines out. It is an excellent general biography, long (635 pages) but seamlessly written and almost un-put-downable. He skilfully covers not only Rodin's personal history but also his work and the world he lived in. Inevitably, considering the lionisa- tion Rodin received from early middle age on, this was a wide social and intellectual mixture, and one can well believe the author's claim to have consulted over 1500 sources, as the richness of his material demonstrates. He is clearly critically aware of the nature of his source-material, but he can also be extremely tactful, as in his handling of some of Rodin's stormier relationships (eg with Gwen John).
There was, of course, a particular fea- ture of Rodin's appeal and reputation from which Grunfeld does not flinch. Women flocked to Rodin from all over the world, inspired — not to say thrilled — by the knowledge that potentially no woman was safe from him. Even for a commissioned portrait bust he would ogle a female sitter from every conceivable angle, his hands exploring further the physicality of the entire body in order to capture the total personality. Not everyone succumbed. One of the funniest accounts of a visit to Rodin cited by Grunfeld is by Isadora Duncan who describes Rodin, hot breath and all, modelling a woman's breast that `palpitated' beneath his fingers. She then demonstrated at Rodin's request her new, scantily-clad style of dancing, but on trying to explain to him the theory behind it she quickly realised he was not listening, as he advanced on her 'eyes blazing' etc. She then claims to have resisted his advances, though with regret. Rodin was quite open about all this, as he explained to William Rothenstein: 'People say I think too much about women . . . Yet, after all, what is there more important to think about?' And it certainly explains the frequent sexual undertones and overtones in his work, climaxing in The Eternal Idol, The All- Devouring Female and other writhing groups. It was not just a one-way obses- sion; these works were in demand from collectors world-wide, one even specifying that in the marble version of The Kiss he was commissioning Torgane genital de l'homme doit etre complet'.
This is undoubtedly an excellent general biography, but a serious criticism is the lack of adequate illustrations. I know sculpture can be difficult to photograph well and that there are iniquitous French monopoly cartels on photography of works of art that can cripple an author financially. But not all Rodins are in France or badly photographed, and if you are going to wax lyrical over the portraits of Joseph Pulitzer or Eve Fairfax — with good reason — you owe it to your reader to give them decent reproductions. So I have reserva- tions about Grunfeld's justification for the poor and infrequent illustration, even if backed up by a maxim of the master. The best solution is, of course, to go to the originals. Here, though, Grunfeld has perhaps been over discreet about the un- supervised production of Rodin's works, particularly since his death. This has now come under rigorous control, but it does mean you have to watch out when you look at a Rodin. Of all this there is no significant mention in Grunfeld's book, possibly be- cause one suspects (as has been said of Monet) that there may be more Rodins in America than Rodin ever produced. In this country we are luckier. In Rodin's lifetime and directly from the artist came works like the W. H. Henley memorial in St Paul's Cathedral crypt, the Burghers of Calais outside the Houses of Parliament, and 20 works donated by the sculptor to the nation in 1914, which now see-saw between the V & A and the Tate. Which is ironic really: if we are ever to gain a true estimate of Rodin as an artist, the two institutions now fighting for the privilege of showing the nation's Rodins should bring out of storage the large number of works by his English contemporaries that have been hidden away for so long that no one can have a clue as to why Rodin was so important. I have no doubt he would survive the challenge.
Benedict Read is the author of Victorian Sculpture (Yale University Press) and Brit- ish Sculpture Between the Wars (The Fine Arts Society).
Previous page
