On the Timeliness and Timelessness of Rodin

…within Rodin there is a dark perseverance which makes him almost nameless; a still, superior patience; something of the great goodness and perseverance of nature… ’One mustn’t hurry,’said Rodin to his few close friends when they urged him on. From Rainer Rilke’s RODIN

The Gates of Hell mark the entryway to what may the be finest collection of Rodin’s sculpture this side of heaven and is certainly the largest assembly of the great French sculptor’s work this side of Paris. Philadelphia’s prestigious Rodin Museum was the last passion of movie-theater mogul Jules Mastbaum who began collecting Rodin sculpture in 1923, six years after the artist’s death. By 1926, Mastbaum had amassed an array of sculpture that would have done Paris proud. He hired two French architects Jacques Greber and Paul Cret to design a museum for the city of Philadelphia so the public could enjoy Rodin’s work.

The architects could not work fast enough to enable Mastbaum to realize his vision. But Mastbaum’s untimely death did not put an end to his dream. The collector’s widow saw the project to completion and the Rodin Museum was dedicated on November 29, 1929, three years after its founder’s death.

A person can have a hard time completing his own greatest works. Just as Jules Mastbaum’s pet project was not finished by the time he died, Rodin himself never completed The Gates of Hell. The work is Rodin’s sculpture, his design, but he never stopped revising it, and there might have been no end to the revision were it not for the artist’s own mortality. The work was not cast in bronze until 1925, eight years after the artist’s death, perhaps allowing enough time to ensure Rodin would not return to make further revisions.

November 17, 1917 was the only deadline Rodin could be compelled to meet. His difficulty with deadlines was legend in his time. Rodin was producing timeless works, yet was expected to do so in a timely manner. His Burghers of Calais was finished nine years later than anticipated, and his memorial to Balzac took seven years instead of the proposed year and a half. The Gates of Hell, commissioned in 1882 for the entrance to the Paris Museum of Decorative Arts, remained in the purgatory of Rodin’s workshop for the rest of the artist’s life.

Rodin’s failure to meet deadlines was not the only aspect of his work to draw criticism. The value of great art is seldom evident in the light of the standards of its time. Acontinuous process of invention, art is always becoming something it is not yet. Artists whose work breaks convention in order to embody this transformation, this growth are the great artists who must endure the growing pains of art.

So it was with Rodin. He spent his lifetime (1840-1917) doing something that was much bigger than life, and was criticized for it at every turn. In his youth, Rodin’s natural unconventional style earned him refusal from the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts three times. When his early realistic figure The Age of Bronze appeared too realistic, he was accused of having cheated by working from a cast of a model’s body rather than fashioning the work by hand. By producing a larger than life-sized Saint John the Baptist, Rodin provided incontrovertible evidence of his virtuosity. As Rodin’s sculpture grew away from realism, he was again criticized for non-adherence to accepted standards.

In 1884, officials of the French city of Calais wanted Rodin to pay sculptural tribute to the valiance of the heroic citizens who offered their own lives to save their city in the English siege of 1347. Those who commissioned the work envisioned a single figure of Eustache de St. Pierre, the leader of the heroic group, presented in the accustomed way, on a pedestal. Rather than having one figure represent all the heroic burghers of Calais, Rodin’s tribute comprised not one upraised figure but six placed at ground level. The city officials were not pleased that Rodin gave them so much more than they expected in terms of sculptural figures. They might have preferred more defiance be expressed and less torment, and they certainly wanted the work done earlier than 1895 when Rodin completed it.

Despite the criticism, there was great demand for Rodin’s work. Demand is desirable for any artist, but its drawbacks should be obvious. Naturally, demand can become extremely demanding. Those who commission art works have certain expectations regarding design parameters and time constraints. Art by its nature resists such conditions and constraints. The art of Rodin met resistance in Calais and even ridicule in Paris for the Balzac monument he did for the Societe de Gens Lettres. The officials of the Societe might have anticipated that they would not get the conventional “figure on a pedestal.” (Rather than placing them on a pedestal, Rodin preferred to have his figures emerging from rock, as if to remind them of their roots.) What Rodin gave the Societe was beyond their aesthetic imaginations and sensibilities. He did not deliver the formally dressed dignified literary figure set to look down on them for eternity, but a rough-hewn, heavily cloaked, disheveled Balzac, caught in the throes of his own powers, surging like a wave against a rocky coast. The sculpture was denounced as a poor likeness, even a caricature.

As his public art drew more attention, so did Rodin’s private life. His morality was scrutinized as is that of today’s celebrities, but by the much less tolerant culture of his time. His relationship with Rose Beuret was frowned upon for decades because it lacked the sanction of matrimony. His brief affair with Camille Claudel, a student half his age, was doubly objectionable as a betrayal of a longstanding illicit relationship.

By the turn of the twentieth century, Rodin had learned the cost of fame, endured its high praise accompanied by low criticism. By the time he met Rainer Rilke, the sculptor and his work were caught in the merciless bombardment of public and “expert” opinion.

In 1902, the 26 year-old Rilke was assigned to write a monograph about the 61 year-old Rodin for art critic Richard Muther’s publication Die Kunst. Rilke came to the project favorably predisposed, having listened attentively to his new bride, Clara Westoff, who had been a student and devoted admirer of Rodin. The monograph became a rhapsodic homage to Rodin’s work. Clearly, Rilke was writing under the influence, in the throes of the rapture of great sculpture. But Rilke’s article was not to be written off as mere ramblings of a dazzled young poet, for Rilke was already a great writer, and the article was exquisite albeit wanting impartiality. Rilke made lush poetic observa- tions of Rodin’s approach to his work. “To create a likeness was for him to seek eternity in a given face…” “nothing escapes him… he knows only what he sees. But he sees everything.” (Rilke, p.54)

In the controversial Balzac sculpture, Rilke saw clearly “a grandeur which possibly overshadows the stature of the writer… a broad, wide-striding figure that that had lost all its heaviness in the fall of its cloak… Balzac in the fertility of his abundance…” (Rilke, pp. 66-68)

It is understandable that Rilke’s advocacy would be welcomed by Rodin. Here at last was unadulterated adulation, beautifully articulated and untainted by the reservations, rebuffs and recrimination Rodin suffered at many a less capable hand. It served to counterbalance the critical mass that weighed as heavily on Rodin as it has on any great living artist.

Rodin was changing the nature of sculpture, managing to imbue static figures with a miraculous dynamism. Rilke’s monograph refers to a “…deep and inward excitation… this rich, astounding unrest of the living. Even stillness, wherever there was stillness, was composed of hundreds of moments of motion counterbalancing one another.” (Rilke, p. 16)

Rodin’s sculptural innovations affected that of the great sculptors who followed, notably Aristide Maillol and Constantin Brancusi. Rilke’s poetry was also greatly influenced by Rodin. Rilke absorbed the sculptor’s commitment to the work. He admired Rodin’s ability “to work as nature works, and not as men…” requiring “no inspiration, but rather only labor...” (Rilke, p. 89) Rilke also benefitted from Rodin’s sense of the thing, as Rilke put it, “something permanent, the next higher order: a thing… itself not beautiful” but endowed with all of beauty’s potential.

No one has ever made beauty. One may merely create friendly or lofty conditions… Guided by a compulsion toward the fulfillment of benefits beyond his grasp [the artist] knows only that there are certain conditions under which beauty may perhaps consent to come to his things. And his calling is to learn these conditions and to achieve the ability to call them forth. (Rilke, p.73)

As the young Rilke was influenced by Rodin, the young Rodin had been influenced by the literature of Dante and Baudelaire. This is how art works. It develops as artists interact with each others’work and sometimes with each other. Rilke related what Rodin had discovered in Baudelaire’s poetry:

In these verses there were passages that leapt out from the page, passages that did not seem written but sculpted; words and groups of words that had been smelted in the poet’s burning hands… Darkly he began to sense that where this art abruptly stopped it thrust on the beginning of another…(Rilke, p. 26)

Rilke’s laudatory monograph so impressed Rodin that in 1905 he hired the young writer to be his secretary, a job that was only to require a few hours of Rilke’s time each day. Figuring this would enable him to work for the artist he admired and still allow plenty of time for his own literary pursuits, Rilke took the position. Although Rodin would turn out to be a much more difficult and demanding employer than Rilke had hoped, and their work relationship would be curtailed in 1906, Rilke’s esteem for Rodin continued unabated.

It is not surprising that Rodin would not be easy on his secretary. For Rodin, life was never an easy thing. As a young boy, he struggled with extreme nearsightedness which made learning to read and write a slow and painstaking process. He had to use his artistic talent to help his family financially by working on public decorative art projects from the time he was 18 years of age. He worked on commercial projects by day and his artistic pursuits at night.

The struggle of art in life, as part of the struggle of life itself, is implicit in much of Rodin’s work. When we look at The Thinker, for instance, what we see is not a man rapt in comfortable contemplation. Sitting on a rock or some hard place, his right elbow extended to lean on his opposite knee, his wrist bent, the hand contorted as if grasping at some frustratingly elusive idea, this Thinker is not enjoying a leisurely moment of musing. He is thinking hard.

The widely recognized sculpture has been interpreted variously as a representation of Dante in particular, of humanity in general, of Rodin himself. There is certainly an element of self-portraiture in this intense figure, a cast of which Rodin had placed by the tomb of Rose Beuret. Rose died in February of 1917, only a few weeks after she and Rodin were, at long last, wed, and less than a year before the sculptor himself would be buried at her side to rest in the eternal company of The Thinker.

Bibliography:
1. http://www.rodinmuseum.org/
2. http://www.cantorfoundation.org/Rodin/rbioe.html
3. Rainer Maria Rilke, RODIN (translated and with introduction by Robert Firmage. Peregrine Smith, Inc. 1979
4. RODIN A GUIDE FOR CHILDREN AND THEIR GROWN-UPS, Publication of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
5. Bach, Penny Balkin. Public Art in Philadelphia. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1992.