Ecce Homo

The Tragic Passion of Auguste Rodin

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When Rilke first wrote to Rodin before beginning his apprenticeship with the sculptor he referred to as his master, he confessed to him that his art “is such (I have felt it for a long time) that it knows how to give bread and gold to painters, to poets, to sculptors: to all artists who go their way of suffering, desiring nothing but that ray of eternity which is the supreme goal of the creative life.”

As is well known, Rilke’s time with his “master” altered his life; it had, conclusively, an immeasurable effect upon the poet. It changed the way he perceived the world, thus it changed the way he lived and the way he wrote. Such experiences are rare. Until his death twenty-four years after his apprenticeship with Rodin, Rilke would struggle to work not according to the erratic whims of his muse, but according to new principles, more pragmatic, craftsman-like principles not contingent upon the vagaries of inspiration. Through traversing his own “way of suffering” Rilke cultivated the “bread and gold” that he received from Rodin while seeking the supreme goal of his creative life: the “ray of eternity.” In such poems as the “Archaic Torso of Apollo” it is evident that Rilke at times discovered it, yet not consistently. To do so is an extremely difficult task few may achieve, if at all, and the poet confessed that he failed “to find the courage to do the most obvious, and to simply work hard in pursuit of my inspiration.” What is significant is that, as an artistic model, Rodin acted as a force upon Rilke, compelling him to strive for something supreme. “Life,” the poet said, “is beginning for me, the life that will celebrate your high example and that will find in you its consolation, its justification, and its strength.” The excessive reverence if not idolatry of Rilke’s sentiment must be put in reserve; it is less Rodin though and more his work which provokes such excitability. It is the passion that it invokes that is instrumental.

Rodin has not only given sustenance of body and soul to painters, poets, and sculptors, he has given it to whomever has received his work, and, currently, it is being received in major exhibitions around much of the world. While the exhibit in Istanbul that is the concern of this meditation is now over, the Musée Rodin in Paris has made contributions to numerous other exhibits including the Tokyo Museum of National Occidental Art exhibit “Rodin” (7 March - 4 June 2006) and the Paris Musée d’Orsay exhibit “Rodin-Carrière” (10 July -1 October 2006). The Fondation Beyeler, Swiss exhibit “Eros” (6 August 2006 - 18 February 2007), the Royal Academy of Arts, London exhibit “Rodin” (23 September 2006 - 1 January 2007), and the Kunsthaus Zürich, Swiss exhibit “Rodin” (9 February 2007 - 20 May 2007) also received contributions from the Musée Rodin, and those exhibitions are still current, with the last soon to open. The Musée Rodin also lent works to exhibits in Germany, Greece, the United States, Italy, and Cambodia. Nearly one hundred years after his death, his work remains not only absolutely modern, it continues to invoke awe, mystery, and adoration as well as astonishment. It speaks to each succeeding generation. It communicates and reveals something and there is a demand, if not need to see and to touch his work, if one is able to, as the blind were generously permitted to by Sakıp Sabancı Museum (SSM) of Istanbul. In engaging with these works, one continues to discover new things in them, to be mesmerized and provoked by them, to be affected in the depths and heights of one’s being. Standing before his work is like standing before a panoply of all the suffering and all the passions of humanity. It is a tragic song of life and SSM presented an expansive array of works in its exhibition “Master Sculptor, Rodin in Istanbul,” which ran from June 13, 2006 - September 3, 2006.

The exhibition, as stated in the press release, was comprised of “203 artworks selected from the collection of the Rodin Museum in Paris,” which included bronze, plaster, and marble sculptures as well as archival photographs, drawings, and objects from Rodin’s own collection of antique Greek and Roman statues. Whereas their stated aim was “to promote wider public appreciation of the art of sculpture through the works of a renowned master” one left the exhibition far more enriched. What one comes to appreciate, and that is surely an insufficient word, what one is galvanized by is existence itself. One is charged by it, awakened to the splendor of the body, though not without knowledge of its fragility, awakened to the truths or an experience of the earth and, more so, of the cosmos. And that is what philosophy and art are ultimately after. It is what Nietzsche was in pursuit of, what Heidegger searched for, what Blanchot struggled to reveal. It is what Rodin gives to us in his sculptures. An immediate, more contiguous experience of the world. If art and philosophy do not open the world up to us, if they do not cast us towards and into it, what is the sense of either? Both must compel us to sacrifice our selves and enter the world, otherwise, we must abandon them for the world and make philosophy and art of our lives. As Nietzsche declared in The Gay Science, “What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?”

Auguste Rodin is considered one of the foremost innovators of modern sculpture, beginning his work in the late nineteenth century and continuing into the twentieth century, a herald shattering the moribund Romanticism of his own era and opening a plethora of doors to the future. In Rodin’s sculptures, an entire new manner of expression was given birth; in an unparalleled way it was bold, daring, and vigorous. Michelangelo’s work comes to mind with such a description, but, as Rodin himself noted, the Tuscan’s art was full of contempt, which is not a negation of his monumental sculpture or his majestic paintings, only a criticism of his non-tragic perspective. “I do not feel his contempt of life. Earthly activity, imperfect as it may be, is still beautiful and good. Let us love life for the very effort which it extracts.” To the chaste, Rodin’s work was scandalous, but to those free of such contempt, exhilarating, tonic, a return or rebirth of the pagan ethos that found in the body not something sinful but something to celebrate. As Huysmans said, it is not the pagans but “only the chaste who are truly obscene.” Rodin, hardly chaste, stated that he could not “work without a model. Seeing human figures nourishes and strengthens me. I have an infinite and almost worshipful reverence of the naked body.”

That reverence was given free expression and the regularity with which Rodin’s sculptures were condemned reveals how daring and sui generis they actually were. The content of his work was not the only thing that brought it censure; its dexterous formal elements and the heterodox interpretation of certain human acts, such as his depiction of heroism in The Burghers of Calais, brought Rodin vigorous criticism, too. Yet, to him, wisely, such rejection only proved the work was full of merit. It confirmed that he truly was engaged in a radical transvaluation of artistic values, and they were an evocation of philosophical values, of a vision of life.

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The innovativeness of his work has hardly been exhausted, if equaled, and it has marked indelibly not only the history of art and of what art shall come to be, of what it can be, but our memory. To see a Rodin sculpture, let alone to touch one, as the blind were fortunate enough to do, is to be forever touched and seen by his sculptures. It is to incorporate something into oneself that can potentially enrich one, to live with something which might provoke metamorphoses, disrupt common perceptions, and compel us to see our selves anew. If it simply prods us to actually perceive our selves and the world, even if only momentarily, that is extremely valuable for it is rare that we escape quotidian perception. When meditating upon his work, one is taken out of and beyond the self and into the wider realm of becoming. One is broken from romantic sentiments, from idealism, and from narrow and limited forms of perception, if, that is, one intimately engages with his work and struggles to extricate oneself from such things. Rather “than dwelling, even if just periodically, in greatness,” Rilke demanded, “we must always carry around what is great in us.” With Rodin, there is much to embody and much to gain from such internalization. Along with Bernini, Michelangelo, and Phidias, Rodin is one of the most formidable sculptors of all time, and through internalizing his work, the magnitude of its expressive force can be experienced again and again, which is a sign of its aliveness. The space that was occupied by the ego is instead occupied by the art work and one may be significantly altered through such a disintegration of the self.

The French master not only worked independently, creating sculptures out of his own desire, but on commissions from the state as well as from private collectors. Yet, even Rodin’s commissioned work, as much as it was sometimes prey to the dictates of those commissioning it, remained overall the product of his imagination alone. Whatever alterations he made to his work were slight; the form and shape of them essentially remained intact—the work was manifest out of his vision. Throughout his life, Rodin worked on individual sculptures, monuments, drawings, sketches, dry point etchings, water-colors (most of them erotic), and works such as The Gates of Hell, into which earlier works would be incorporated and transformed and out of which a profusion of other works would be born. Each work was a possible occasion for new work and new work could intermingle with earlier work, through which entirely novel configurations were executed. Extremely industrious and disciplined, Rodin would not focus on one sculpture at a time, but numerous, often taking on multiple commissions in the same year, continuing to work on some over a period of years. Of the 203 works included in the exhibit, twenty-two of them are plaster, two marble, and seventy-nine bronze; they range from early works such as Bust of the Man with a Broken Nose and The Age of Bronze, to later works like The Monument to Victor Hugo, The Burghers of Calais, The Monument to Balzac, and The Thinker as well as more statues derived from The Gates of Hell. This though, while a significant selection, is only a fraction of Rodin’s oeuvre; aside from the multitude of sculptures, captive in the archives of the Musée Rodin are nearly seven thousand erotic drawings and water-colors, works which not even the most industrious of researchers have seen, let alone the general public, and the more monographs one views, the more works one discovers, too. It is highly probable that there are also sculptures which have never been photographed or exhibited.

In considering all of this work, one is simply overcome. Its effect is one of stupefaction. It is indicative of an overflowing, abundant, and copious reservoir of energy directed and formed by a prodigious imagination. Rodin is rich with the fullness of life. It bursts out of him like a geyser. Few artists deserve the cognomen titan. He does. Rodin worked, and everything was essentially sacrificed to work. No wonder Rilke was in awe of him. The sheer unending scope and variety of his sculpted figures is astonishing.

Rodin articulates through them an array of uncommon postures, gestures, and expressions straining the human body to its absolute limits, giving animation to a breadth of experience most human beings never live out. Olympic athletes, dancers, and acrobats may live through a wide degree of them, but even they have not experienced some of the states of being which produce the conditions found in The Burghers of Calais. Most human beings simply won’t, but that is not an indication the sculptures are alien to us. In Rodin’s work, humanity comes face to face with its tragic reality, with the passion and suffering inherent in human existence. It is as if we are seeing manifest before us in palpable mass Oedipus, Antigone, and Hamlet. Eros and the Bacchantes come before us, too, and a host of other characters, all physical revelations of the play of man’s soul. The fullness of this imagination, its inventiveness and diversity, appears inexhaustible and illimitable, and it reflects and expresses enduring truths about who we are.

What we find in this work, too, is devotion, a single-minded and purposeful devotion to a single task. It is the work of one who is making something of his life, the work of one struggling to become who he is, and in Rodin’s struggle, humanity’s struggle is evident. Its struggle to think, to breathe, to dance, to sing, to live with suffering, to transform; its struggle to come out of the granite of being and into the tempestuous flow of becoming, to overcome and strive, to laugh, love, and create, to be noble human beings and great friends, it is all there, as well as our defeat, our struggle before the inexplicable forces of the cosmos which often tear us to pieces. Rendered to bits, we are reformed and cast back into the world like Dionysus. And it is the force of the gods one comes face to face with in Rodin’s sculptures again and again; that is, the forces of the world metamorphosized into mythic figures, for there are no deities, only the planets.

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In “Master Sculptor, Rodin in Istanbul” the first sculpture that one encounters, and it is one of Rodin’s most dynamic, is, as are many of the statues on the grounds of the Musée Rodin of Paris, outside the exhibition. In front of the Horse Mansion, which housed the exhibit, a bronze statue of a horse had been situated since 1952, “saluting the Bosporus” as the press release notes. In place of it, Rodin’s Monument to Victor Hugo was situated for the occasion of the exhibit. It was the first time that the horse statue had been replaced; whatever its merits, the decision to replace it was wise, for the Monument to Victor Hugo is a stunning work to encounter unsuspected, and cresting the small hill on which the Horse Mansion rests, one comes upon the monument as if upon the statue of a god. Granted, that may seem hyperbolic, but Rodin himself compared Hugo to Zeus and said “there was something in Victor Hugo’s face that was reminiscent of Jupiter, Hercules, and Pan.” Indeed, a rather grandiose proclamation, but, look at Hugo’s face, especially Rodin’s drawing of it—is it not true? The grandeur and sublimity of the figures which Rodin saw in Hugo’s face are in the monument, and it is mesmerizing. Phidias’ sculpture of Jupiter at Olympia was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World; struck by it, Theodosius I removed it to Constantinople to display in his palace. In 475 it was destroyed by a fire and, in many ways, contemplation of Jupiter ended. Over fifteen hundred years later, Rodin’s version of Jupiter returns to ‘Constantinople’ and he stands not like a sentinel but like Orpheus luring one into the exhibition. While it may not be a wonder of the world it is an impressive statue; considering the current religious climate, if it remains saluting the Bosporus, may it not burn. Now is a time of conflagrations.

Before obeying the ‘god’s’ command, homage is due; at the very least, one must receive him and there is something grand and mythic in Hugo’s face. Rodin’s sketches express those sentiments, but the Monument communicates his awe with even more emotion and it is executed with geometric intelligence, which would become Rodin’s guiding principle. “The essence of sculpture lies,” he said, “in the geometry of forms rather than in the appearance of things.” Geometric form is precisely one of the things which makes the Monument so compelling; one stands before it as before an altar, but Hugo is hardly poised to listen to the confession of a sinner; what he is listening to is the muse; perched above him, an elusive, feminine figure whispers towards his ear the ineluctable secret of his art as Zarathustra whispered a secret into the ear of life.(3) And what is the muse if not nature or the cosmos? It is not some mythological figure Hugo is listening to, but the cosmos, the energies of the world “bursting forth from nature herself” as Nietzsche stated in The Birth of Tragedy, and those are the energies that the artist must perforce honor and obey, sacrificing himself to nature. It is “intoxicated reality” Nietzsche elaborates, which “even seeks to destroy the individual and redeem him by a mystic feeling of oneness.” In Rodin’s monument, Hugo is firmly entrenched in nature, someone who subordinated himself to it; he is aware that humans are not “the true authors of this art world” but those who transfigure it, Apollonian measurers who must shape the miasma that Dionysus spits forth into an intelligible and expressive form. Like Hugo, Rodin’s ear was quick to the earth and the sculpture is evidence of an artist who possesses Dionysian wisdom. Of the statue Rodin said “I have gravitated toward this all my life.” Such tension or force is evident in the design of the work; one can feel and see in it the very gravity that possessed and drove Rodin.

In contemplating the Monument, one is struck at once by energy not at rest; like the earth on which it stands, it seems to ceaselessly revolve. The writer’s left arm juts into the air like he were cutting space in two, stretched out to measure the circumference of the world; like the arm of Galatea in Rodin’s Pygmalion and Galatea, Hugo’s arm stretches out into infinity. It is perhaps one of the straightest lines in all of Rodin’s sculptures, and this long, muscular arm seems to balance the very ground beneath it, commanding gravity, the palm open, pointing downwards as if above the cosmos. One half expects everything to begin orbiting around one while standing before the Monument as if one were up above the world, or rather to see at last with the naked eye the velocity of the earth as it soars through space at nearly seventy thousand miles per hour, simultaneously revolving at over one thousand miles per hour. Existence is hardly still. Life is full of velocity but it is rare we are cognizant of it. Rodin reveals what the common eye does not perceive, and when we do not consciously perceive, we are not in the world but out of time.

To those who do not seem present, who drift out of consciousness and into some state of blankness, it is said that they are “in space” or “spaced out.” It is not only those who are absent from their bodies who experience this state, but all of us, and continually; it is more common than we admit and, surprisingly, the colloquial phrase reveals something about a philosophical condition—to be “spaced out” is not to be in time, which is not to be in the world. One of the means through which we can overcome this condition can be found in art, though that overcoming is only temporary; that however does not negate the significance of art’s power. It illustrates that it is a practice which we must constantly engage in. Nothing is permanent or lasting, not even our wisdom, or rather, our ability to sustain and embody things; as we must work to remain conscious perceivers, we must continually strive to sustain and embody our wisdom. To exist, to retain certain states of being for longer periods of time, we must engage in disciplines, otherwise we will be perpetually adrift in space, spaced out of time. Along with philosophy, yoga, and meditation, art, which is itself a form of meditation, if one exerts the same or a similar degree of concentration in contemplating the work that the artist did in executing it, is but one of the means by which we can move out of space and into time, and it is only when we are in time that we are potentially free, not blind perceivers, but conscious perceivers struggling to remain in a state of becoming. And that is when we truly exist.

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In Time and Free Will, which was published several years after the execution of The Thinker and while Rodin was at work on The Burghers of Calais, Henri Bergson noted that one of the objects of art is

to put to sleep the active or rather resistant powers of our personality, and thus to bring us into a state of perfect responsiveness, in which we realize the idea that is suggested to us and sympathize with the feeling that is expressed. In the processes of art we find in a more weakened form a refined and in some measure spiritualized version of the processes commonly used to induce hypnosis.

If the artist is not conscious of this truth, it is known intuitively, and this form of hypnosis is not ordinary, but, as Bergson implies, unique, a “refined” and “spiritualized” form of hypnosis through which we are “lulled into self-forgetfulness, and, as in a dream,” we are able to at last think and see “with the poet.” It is through the rhythm and measure of art that our attention is held captive, and, in this captive state, we are more receptive, thus capable of experiencing what our personalities, out of fear or comfort or complacency, keep us from experiencing. It is self-forgetfulness that is vital; without this necessary depersonalization we will not permit our selves to be infected, not permit our selves to experience the contagion (Bergson uses this same word) with which the artist seeks to infect and thereby alter us. It is through this act that our thought and our will are absorbed in the eternity of the art work and it is then that, at last, we step into time. Normally, our perception oscillates “between the same and the same again, and gets rid of those customary incessant changes which in ordinary life bring us back without ceasing to the consciousness of our personality.” When we escape our personalities, we experience the world and share in the emotion “so rich, so personal, so novel” of the artist’s work; we “experience what [the artist] cannot make us understand.” In moving beyond logic, the artist propels us back, or perhaps forward into time from the space where we were adrift. It is then that “the barrier interposed by time and space between [the artist’s] consciousness and ours” is broken. It is an intimate communion and it is in this communion that an opening occurs. Instead of making us understand something, the artist provokes us to experience something, and through experience, we come to understand on our own, hopefully, which is more lasting and more effective then simply being told something. The first is a strict dispensation of facts; the second, a creative production which leads to real learning. The artist, or rather, the work of art is the Dionysian totem to which we must sacrifice our selves and what casts us back into nature, and, through his work, Rodin casts us again and again back into nature, time, and the cosmos.

Through the fragmentary, there is a direct and galvanizing confrontation with time in Rodin’s sculptures. The placement of his numerous fragmentary works amongst his personal collection of Greek and Roman sculptures, themselves no longer whole works but embattled objects, was one of the most illuminating arrangements in the exhibition. It is an arrangement Rodin himself made when exhibiting his work and it was wise to repeat it. In viewing these works together, from the tender Dawn in its numerous manifestations to Torso of a Walking Man, the moving Torso of a Shade, Walking Man with Column, which is an evocative sculpture that is a kind of precursor to Andre Masson’s drawing of the Acephalic man, and the enormous and imposing Cybele, at first, it is possible to misconstrue Rodin’s work for Greek or Roman sculpture.

The Man with the Broken Nose could be Democritus, Empedocles, or Marcus Aurelius, but he is none of those men, and the timelessness of Rodin’s sculptures is accentuated through this context. His work is at once classical yet modern, for it is not the golden detritus of a glorious age that has survived millennia, although it bears a striking resemblance to such work. It is consciously designed work which only appears to originate from some earlier epoch. While the fragmentary nature of the ancient work is of course the result of the ravages of history, with Rodin’s work that is not the case, though, in another sense, it is, for it is purposefully deployed to replicate history while it has other dimensions, too. Rodin did not begin expressing the fragmentary out of a systematic or theoretical position; his relationship to the fragmentary first arose intuitively. Out of that organic discovery he developed a conscious and deliberate practice, which, because willed, is all the more impressive and admirable; the intuitive is not of more intrinsic value as is too often purported—that is an outmoded prejudice. It is possible for even the most pedestrian artist to accidentally arrive at a great idea and to execute it well, but to execute great ideas continually and with considerable force requires discipline, perseverance, and actual skill, not just the fortune of luck, and in that is the true test of ‘greatness’. It is but one of the means by which one can measure it. For Rodin, the “art of the sculptor is made of strength, exactitude, and will. In order to express life, to render nature, one must will and will with all the strength of the heart and brain,” which is to say, it is the configuration of both intuition and intellect that is vital. It is a matter of sense and geometry, of intuition and will. This is the lesson that was so important, and difficult, for Rilke. After it, relying on inspiration alone was too haphazard and accidental a form of work.

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