★★★☆☆
After more than a year of semi-solitary existence, interspersed with the occasional out-door meeting with select family and friends, the appearance of other people has become increasingly alien. And with the government mandated distance to be maintained at all times, the usual interactions of hands and arms and the close-up reading of each other’s faces have become not only a distant memory but even, at times, a life threatening action. And so, it was a delight to find that my first exhibition visit out of the trap after the (hopefully) final lockdown was one filled with such humanity and tactility.
This display at Tate Modern is a selection of plaster casts of hands and feet, heads and arms, and even the occasional full figure. They have almost all been decamped from their usual home at the Musee Rodin in Paris, a wonderful collection of sculpture both finished and otherwise kept in the eponymous sculptors central Paris home (to say nothing of its gorgeous sun trap of a garden, a rare commodity in Hausmanns’ city). By selecting to show just the plaster models rather than the more classically correct final bronze casts of Rodin’s work, the curators at Tate are endeavouring to expose the visitor to the creative processes, both physical and imaginative, that lie behind the scenes of his career. This they only achieve with a modicum of success.
The early life Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) has all the makings of your storybook creative genius, born the son of a policeman in a working-class suburb of Paris he was repeatedly rejected from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, following this he flirted with taking holy orders but ended up assisting in the studio of a manufacturer of objet-d’art. It was not until his mid-30s, in a Paris now inseminated with Impressionism, that his career as a sculptor began to take off. It is a hackneyed story, told with hindsight, of the world’s cruel habit of rejecting genius until, in some cases, it is tragically too late. It is more often than not oversold, the qualities of the shunned artist being more elusive than nostalgia will permit us to remember. This is not the case when it comes to Rodin.
Sculpture is a far more difficult medium than painting. For a start there is the expense of the materials, be it stone, marble, bronze etc., then the space required not only for its creation but also its storage, display, the issues of transportation and the fact that much fewer people commission sculpture than ever commission painting. In the days when the church dominated Europe there was a ready-made buyer and subject matter, even in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the gloriously wealthy dynasties of Popes and Emperors kept Canova and Bernini employed to deck out palazzi and acres of formal gardens. But in the late nineteenth century? What was the role of a sculptor to be?
It was this backdrop that makes Rodin’s response to that question even more mesmerising. Eschewing the clinical refinements of the neoclassical that had been so fashionable in the previous decades, his works are raw with humanity and, most of all, human suffering. The anxiety of the industrial age is there in the faces and gestures of Rodin’s subjects and in the plaster fragments and abandoned models now at the Tate this has never been more clear.
Possibly his masterwork, an arrangement of six male figures in a loosely huddled group entitled The Burghers of Calais (1889), here in its studio plaster form, is the highlight of the show. Commissioned by the town of Calais it memorialises the passage of the Hundred Years War when, after his famous victory at Crecy, the English King Edward III besieged the port of Calais. After some time Edward offered clemency for the town if six of its leaders would give themselves over to him, presumably for execution. The six men in Rodin’s sculpture are shown on their walk to the English camp, nooses around their necks, resigned to their fate yet noble in their act of self-sacrifice. In the end the King spared their lives but the figures in the sculpture don’t know this, their anguish is perpetual. Bronze casts of this work are quite common, other than in Calais itself there also happens to be one around the back of the Palace of Westminster, symbolising, rather optimistically, the kind of self sacrificing service that representatives of the people ought to emulate.
However, here in the quiet detached environment of Tate’s galleries, without plinth and without the implicit grandeur of bronze, their white faces reflecting white walls, one can almost walk amongst them and feel their silent sorrow. They become timeless, their extraordinary gestures and expressions displaying a range of emotion, from stoicism to despair, to which any one of us can relate. Exaggerated hands like knotted roots reach up to cradle a head or are thrown up to the heavens in a sign of fatalism. This is sculpture as frozen performance. As one walks around the group different vignettes become visible through the parting of arms and legs, they seem to walk at your pace as you make an orbit – there is no proper ‘view’ of this work, no front or back, Rodin is acutely aware that this is the unique privilege of sculpture.
In other rooms the abandoned or unfinished casts have their own pathos. Headless, dismembered creations, recognisably human but straining for some sense of identity. The crisis of individuality in the industrial world incarnate but with all the tragic grandeur of classical fragments in the British Museum. At other times his strange amalgamations of fragments kept and re-scaled from other works, only ever made for personal viewing, seem to bridge symbolism and surrealism. Lilliputian figures battling with enormous human hands, tiny female busts incorporated into real ancient pots, or the six heads of the Burghers of Calais, now the size of ping-pong balls and being encircled by seraphim. What emerges is a mind that works in three-dimensions at all times, always interested in the relations of human bodies to their inner-lives and those of others.
However, all of this talk of human pathos and suffering, of symbolist inclinations and interpersonal relations is neglected by the show itself which is obsessed with the physical processes of Rodin’s art. Maybe the curators felt that the works spoke well enough for themselves leaving them to focus on their own agenda? They are lucky that they do, and even their best (or worst) efforts at distraction with technical process and terminology fails to detract from the art.
There are two areas particularly where the exhibition falls down. The show makes much of its attempts to recreate a display of his plaster casts that Rodin himself put on in 1900 in Paris. Large black and white photographs of this event are printed on the walls only going to underscore the rather lacklustre display in the room in comparison. As I have already noted, one of the most wonderful things about Rodin is that his works are truly three-dimensional, there is scarcely an angle from which his sculptures fail to enthral and offer new perspectives. The photos of the 1900 exhibition show visitors taking great pleasure in walking all around the sculptures and taking in all 360 degrees. With the exception of The Burghers of Calais, the Tate curation ropes off or places works against walls in such a way that getting a true sense of them as sculpture in the round is impossible. For an exhibition all about the sculptors’ craft, only ever allowing the visitor to see the curator’s idea of the ‘front’ of each work seems a tragic oversight.
The other problem I have with this show is the rather hamfisted attempt at incorporating the women in Rodin’s life into the narrative of the exhibition. As with many men of the late nineteenth century, Rodin’s relationship with women was complex and at times not at all laudable. This being said they did undoubtedly play a vital role in his life and career, from the his lifelong relationship with his wife Rose Beuret to the famous and long running creative partnership and affair with the extraordinary sculptor Camille Claudel, a tempestuous if often brilliant union that has been credited with her own mental collapse later in life. These fascinating, important and complicated relationships, as well as a couple of other profiles of female sitters, are thrown away with cursory wall texts that contextualise these women only in relation to the ‘hero artist’ of Rodin. Theirs is a side of the story that needs to be told and deserves a lot more than Tate’s feeble attempt in this show, which stinks of nothing more than ‘MeToo’ era box ticking rather than a concerted effort to give a platform to these women.
The Making of Rodin at Tate Modern is a show that is carried by the exceptional creative genius and skill of its subject. Rodin’s figures, their pains and joys, their hands and faces, and their exemplary humanity manage to defeat the Tate curators’ poor context and setting, making this show an excellent reintroduction to art after months of screens and books. No art can be truly appreciated through a laptop screen and sculpture more than most has to be seen in person.
Morgan Haigh 