Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol.original_ [85]
Rodin acknowledged her gifts: “I have shown her where to find gold, but the gold she has found is really her own,” but talent wasn’t enough. As his career prospered and hers faltered, she become more bitter until her brother committed her to an asylum where she spent the last forty years of her life.
Rodin’s greatest triumph was also his most savagely criticized work: a ten-foot-tall statue of the French writer Balzac. “I should like to do something out of the ordinary,” he said with modest understatement when he began the monument. The result, unveiled in 1898 as a plaster sculpture, was so “out of the ordinary” that the public, critics, and his patrons were overwhelmingly hostile.
The statue bore little resemblance to Balzac, who, in fact, had an unpreposessing, stout build. Rodin wrapped him in a flowing robe, with most of the author’s body indefinite except his grossly exaggerated mane of hair, projecting eyebrows, and recessed eyes. “I sought in ‘Balzac’ ... to render in sculpture what was not photographic. My principle is to imitate not only form but also life.” His radical design made no attempt to reproduce the great writer’s actual features. What Rodin portrayed was the act of cre-ativity itself, using drastic simplification and distortion to make the head seem to erupt from the massive body. It was “the face of an element,” the writer Lamartine said; “the sum of my whole life,” Rodin called it.
Rodin, “Balzac,” 1897, Musée Rodin, Paris. Rodin dispensed with literal accuracy in portraying the French writer, relying on an intuitive, summary approach that distorted anatomy to express the concept of genius.
“Artistically insufficient” and “a colossal fetus,” his patrons howled. Others compared “Balzac” to a penguin, a sack of coal, and a shapeless larva. “A monstrous thing, ogre, devil and deformity in one,” wrote an American journalist. Rodin defended his conception as “a really heroic Balzac who ... boils over with passion.... Nothing I have ever done satisfied me so much, because nothing cost me so much, nothing sums up so profoundly what I believe to be the secret law of my art.”
His secret law was incompletion — or the power of suggestion — as an aesthetic principle. Rodin rescued sculpture from mechanical reproduction with his rugged, “unfinished” surfaces and suppression of detail.
CONTRIBUTIONS. By 1900 Rodin was acknowledged as the world’s greatest living sculptor. Critics hailed him for the very qualities they had once denounced: portraying psychological complexity and making sculpture a vehicle for personal expression. Brancusi called Rodin’s “Balzac,” which brought sculpture to the brink of abstraction, “the incontestable point of departure for modern sculpture.”
SHAW ON RODIN
When the English writer George Bernard Show decided to sit for his sculpted portrait, it was only on the condition that Rodin do it. Believing Rodin ranked with giants like Michelangelo, Shaw concluded, “any man, who, being a contemporary of Rodin, deliberately allowed his bust to be mode by anybody else, must go down to posterity (if he went down at all) as a stupendous nincompoop.”
The initial sitting met the satiric writer’s expectations. Impressed by Shaw’s forked beard, hair parted in two locks, and sneering mouth, Rodin exclaimed, “Do you know, you look like — like the devil!” Smiling with pleasure, Shaw said, “But I am the devil!”
Shaw’s account of sitting for his portrait provides insight into Rodin’s working methods.
“The most picturesque detail of his method was his taking a big draught of water into his mouth and spitting it onto the clay to keep it constantly pliable. Absorbed in his work, he did not always aim well and soaked my clothes.”
“While he worked he achieved a number of miracles,” Shaw wrote, describing how after 15 minutes