ARTS Collaborator with catastrophe
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Critical asides to the reader are a tricky business and often mean that your re- viewer, unable to give a proper account of what is in front of him, is up to no good. Like those would-be pointed declarations of intent tossed lightly to the audience from scheming characters in Restoration plays, they can hold up the action too long. And if prefatory asides are thus a dodge, to postpone embarrassing confronta- tions while the critic tests an escape route, I must come into the open and say that the Rodin exhibition of sculpture (held under Arts Council auspices at the Hayward gal- lery) leaves me singularly unmoved. The show is a noble gesture of its kind and, if anything, belated; my feelings for the artist are respectful but unenthusiastic towards the greater part of his work.
Confessions of probable lack of discern- ment from critics are usually another form of confidence trick or delaying tactic, but one feels on stronger ground with Rodin— sufficiently so to avoid apology—because in varying degrees this allergy or at least hesi- tancy is shared by a large number of people. My own aversion to Rodin, mistrust even of what he wanted to do within his historical context, cannot be modified in nature, only by degree; and here the tact- ful choice and installation of sculpture at the Hayward only relatively alleviates what is still an enervating spectacle. There are, I think, three reasons for this failure to respond.
The first is a matter of taste: in general. I gravitate toward Greek sculpture rather than Italian. The Greeks could laugh at themselves, the Romans could not. More factually, in his notes On Art and Artists, Rodin partially explains the way which Michelangelo's precepts were followed in his own group of standing figures, The Shades, so that 'you see none of those openings which, resulting from the freedom with which the arms and legs were placed, gave lightness to Greek sculpture.' In Rodin's work, Gothic darkness triumphs over light, and the mound and hollow of Michelangelo are preferred to the poise and openness of Greek form.
The second reason for blankness in the face of Rodin's achievement is reasonable, I believe, for my generation, but perhaps paradoxical for the age we are living in. Rodin's attempts to use the human body as a vehicle for the entire cosmos and at times, it seems, for much else, are finally self-consuming. For he was inspired by
great themes: . . to seek eternity in a countenance', according to Rilke, among many other intentions, which figuratively included the ideas of damnation, redemp- tion, sin, universal love, time, the seasons, the elements: the list is inexhaustible. The human body in my experience does a num- ber of things marvellously well, is beauti- ful in itself, and can extend that beauty by implication in certain gestures, particular movements. But not all gestures, not in every movement. Rodin strained the pos- sibilities to excessive lengths and the re- sults were frequently rhetorical, uncon- vincing or absurd.
Given the transcendent ideas which meant
so much to Rodin, we are left with posture or physical behaviour, cast in bronze. The paradox here is that for at least one genera- tion in my own time behaviour has been more absorbing than ideas, often danger- ously so. But the behaviour in Rodin's work is constantly in extremities: flesh, blood, tendons and muscles are forced to assume too much of an emotional burden, let alone formal strain; these writhing con- tortions are too devious and protracted. Men do not stand as Adam stands, .in that con- voluted, corkscrew posture - except in art, and here we are at the heart of the trouble. For Rodin's art was really the vindication and triumph of the Academy, battening onto and overloading a tradition- that was, in itself, restricted. The hindsight we all have now, opening on alternative traditions, makes it hard to view with pleasure the spectacle of so much intensity of feeling packed into so narrow a receptacle. There is also the highly questionable practice, en- couraged by Rodin, of making the archaic fragment, the torso with selected limbs miss- ing, a self sufficient and indeed new work of art.
Rodin's attempt, often successful, to give life to the surface of forms, through a peculiarly liquid kind of modelling, did a tremendous amount to re-vitalise the kind of sculpture which the smoothness of eighteenth century finish had atrophied into the blankness or soapiness of Victorian near-effigies. This surface liquidity was unknown before Rodin's example; but it led to disastrously mannered results in the later work of Giacometti. Rodin marked rather more than the end of a tradition, the sealing off of an epoch: his art, in becoming so over-blown, made further ad- vances in the direction partially charted by the Renaissance quite impossible. The ad- vent of Brancusi, with his concentration on pure shape and a new simplicity in con- struction that was also very ancient, was not only essential but inevitable.
The best element in Rodin is his genuine and unforced eroticism, shown in most of the sculptures of women. The Kiss is a convincing and beautiful work; other single figures of females show the same warm understanding, though it is less fulfilled in the fragmented sculptures: erotic energy has to flow uninterruptedly, and con- centration on an isolated section of anat- omy does not distill the flow which is at once dispersed. The most engaging figures are those of dancers; in part their success may be due to the discipline imposed over Rodin by the dance movements themselves.
The recipient of many honours, visited by kings, praised by poets, with sizeable collections of his work in foreign countries —notably America—Rodin achieved all the recognition possible for an artist by the end of his life in 1917. The students at the Slade tied themselves to his carriage during a visit to England. He made many portraits of his contemporaries, ranging from a splendidly incisive head of Baudel- aire to a more conventional and mechani- cal bust of Shaw. Anatole France was less eager to sit for him, saying: 'Obviously, your Rodin is a genius, but what of it? To my mind, he is too great a collaborator wit' catastrophe.' The kind of catastrophes th Western world has seen since the turn o the century make Rodin's figures in purga tory seem somewhat self indulgent, to near the mock heroics of the Open Comique and confined, always, by an ide• of art, by the pressure of the museum rather than a truly imaginative recognitio of life.
The same confinement and similar prey sures, however different the terms, now con front our younger sculptors: every pro gression, each apparent revolution, carries the seeds of atrophy. As a basically con• servative sculptor, Rodin retained the powers of extreme flexibility, but incessant homage to art left no space or time for these powers to search out ideas which might have made history instead of em- balmed what was already there.
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