Art
Rodin and After
By NEVILE WALLIS
`JUDGES don't age,' murmured the judge in The Chalk Garden, `time decorates them.' In a sense Rodin's sculpture is as unageing as its Greek or Gothic sources. Yet, since his death in 1917, changing taste has decorated his dramas of the spirit of man with its own glosses. Thirty years ago William Rothenstein introduced the view that Rodin's type of poetic vision coupled with his preoccupation with unusual sexual subject-matter was haore Indian in spirit than Greek. In today's reassessment culminating in the Louvre's recent 'Rodin In- connu' exhibition, the master has swung into favour for his expressionist aspect, his later emphases and craggy surfaces seeming in this view to look forward to our fashionable gesticula- tions. But the truth surely is that his complex carnal and spiritual aspirations were so elevated by this mystical preacher and interpreter of
Michelangelo as to bind him closely to his declamatory, but still unhysterical age.
The latest exhibition of Rodin's mostly small bronzes staged by Roland, Browse's gallery draws on the Louvre's and contains many late pieces posthumously cast. Such is the series of flowing dancers in the freely expressive movements of the `chaltut,' which he saw at the Moulin Rouge and elsewhere. His diversity of expression and formal invention is brought out in studies for the Porte de l'En/er and the Burghers of Calais, in the rippling monumental torsos, or in a massive hand whose four clawing digits have the thrust of the arched necks of a quadriga. Moore at times, Leon Underwood, and most of all Epstein have responded to Rodin's power of conveying every nuance of the interior spirit of •a figure through the stresses and rhythms of the exterior. But then they grew up in his shadow.
Ralph Brown did not. It was therefore the more interesting to discover a Rodinesque energy animating his gnarled group of meat porters, as well as some fluid swimming figures in bronze, which this youngish sculptor of the Royal College gave us a few years ago. Now Germaine Richier has become the dominant influence in Brown's latest bronzes at the Leicester Galleries. These aggressively lacerated females and insectile creatures resembling now a praying mantis, now some corrupt temple goddess with horned head- dress, take us into surrealist fantasy. But still one perceives how the sprouting protuberances, the eroded skins and stumps of these extravaganzas were foreshadowed in Brown's works which forced out the ruggedness and sensualism of Rodin's later fragments.
This sounds both hybrid and repulsive to a degree? Just so is Brown's cleft Turning Woman in Battersea Park. Yet as one broods at the Leicester, the animalistic vitality of these creatures is the overwhelming sensation. The only question left wide open is how long this emotional voltage can be maintained, and what comes after?
Vitality is just what Reg Butler's bronzes, and more studious drawings at the Hanover, con- spicuously lack. His variations on his few pre- occupations wear at last an exhausted air. A theorist, self-conscious and inhibited, he intro- duces a strained voluptuousness into his nudes as if to sweeten the conceptual pill. His perennial sentinel has been joined by a slotted box-tower, replacing the early cage; the girl tugging off her vest has lost her arms and expressive meaning, and become a top-heavy bronze caryatid support- ing nothing. More clearly than ever, Butler comes out as a contriver of limited means and archi- tectural persuasion, wanting a sculptor's natural endowment. A series of variously stylised figurines here displays such ingenuity as Derain's by-products, but it hardly relieves a discouraging collection.
'I'm afraid it's lung cancer.'
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