Rodin and Tradition

Rodin and Tradition January 12, 2016

The last time we had a Rodin revival was during the 1960s, writes Jed Perl. He seemed to capture the revolutionary 60s “ambiguous, contradictory, and conflicted” relation to tradition. Rodin is enjoying something of a revival again today, and Perl thinks it is for much the same reasons.” Despite his reputation among “sophisticated museumgoers” as an “armored and ostentatious” sculptor, a representative of tradition, he was aware of “all tradition’s dangers—the prepackaged emotions, the schematic thinking, the programmatic solutions.”

And his ambivalence is evident in the self-ironizing character of his work: “Rodin, with his zigzagging enthusiasms, may have been the first sculptor to conceive of the monument in ways that unmade the monument. He set the stage for the twentieth-century sculptor’s conflicted allegiances to grandiosity and intimacy, as well as what many have come to see as modernism’s embrace of ambiguity. Although Rodin was capable of placing an expressive figure on an imposing base, as in his beguiling salute to the seventeenth-century landscape painter Claude Lorrain, often he aimed to destabilize the monument, suggesting with The Burghers of Calais that heroic figures might have no need for a pedestal and transforming the imposing, cloaked figure of Balzac into a mountainous talisman, a primordial plinth.”

Perl again: “With Rodin, surfaces become changeable, unpredictable, roiled, coruscated, with a life of their own. Rilke—who arrived in Paris in 1902 to write a monograph about Rodin, admired the artist immensely and spent a good deal of time at his side, eventually working as his secretary—was the first to declare that ‘the fundamental element of his art [was] the surface.’ . . . Rodin rejected the sense of completeness—of the figure as a whole, perceived all at once, from head to foot—in favor of the figure that is masked or shrouded, or barely separated from the block of marble from which it emerges, or only a fragment, the body disembodied, with the part (a hand, a foot, a torso) standing in for the whole. This breakdown of the classical figure suggested entropy—a move toward disorder—but also possibility, a dismemberment of the heroic body that brought not death but renewal.” 

In Rodin we can see an early artistic struggle to formulate a “modern cosmology” using the fragments and shards of earlier tradition. There’s the grand ambition, at the same time a recognition of the pretense of ambition. Like other modernists, Rodin aimed at “an epic in parts drawn from a fragmented universe.” Artists who have ambition retain the same ambition to this day.


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