Rodin by David J. Getsy

I’m sure I picked this up at one of the many art museums I like to visit when I’m traveling. Which one, I don’t remember. Perhaps it was the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia itself, but my dim memory suggests that it was disappointedly closed on the day I had reserved for my visit there. Perhaps, then, it was at the Philadelphia Museum of Art down the street.

The subtitle of the book is “Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture,” and, indeed, one of the two long essays that the book contains deals effectively with the sexual themes that subsumed much of this famous sculptor’s work. My favorite anecdote from this study deals with Rodin’s famous and monstrous sculpture of Honoré de Balzac, which not only intentionally looks like an enormous phallus in silhouette, but which, based on the early studies Rodin experimented with, secretly has Balzac gripping his own erect penis (the seat of both sexual virility and creative genius in Rodin’s idiom) under the voluminous robes that otherwise drape his towering torso. 

But far more interesting to me are the parts that deal with the second part of the subtitle: the making of modern sculpture. I have personally always been drawn to sculpture as an artform, and to Rodin’s work specifically. That probably explains my failed attempt to visit the Rodin Museum, and this book certainly explains what Rodin was trying to accomplish and, perhaps, why his work is so pivotal in art history. Yes, his work is sexual, but more importantly, his work is abstract.

All sculptures operate between image and object, between representation and materiality, but Rodin’s intervention into the discourse of nineteenth-century sculptural praxis was to sacrifice verisimilitude, representational consistency, and the coherence of the figure itself in order to let his acts of making overtake the object even after the form had undergone material transcriptions and been the product of other hands. Rodin deployed signs of his presence that would survive the translations of a sculpture across materials but that always pointed back to the fact that the sculpture was made by him, establishing its scene of creation as the primary source of significance for the viewer.

The author is here referring to the many material translations that sculptural works of art often went through in Rodin’s day -- from the original clay to plaster to bronze or to marble -- before they would be displayed and viewed by the public. Through those processes, subtle changes would sometimes intentionally and sometimes not creep into the work, obscuring the original artist’s intent. In putting his marks on the work that could not be obscured, Rodin was making sure not only that his audience would know his work when they saw it, but that they would place the emphasis of their attention on his act of creation rather than on the finished piece. 

This is partly why so much of Rodin’s work shows figures either dismembered or emerging half-formed from the very lumps of clay or blocks of stone from which Rodin conjured them. Accurate representation of an image was not what mattered to Rodin. What mattered was his sensual acts of artistic creation. And this, the author argues, is most appropriately seen as Rodin’s seminal contribution to modern art.

Ultimately, what I am arguing is that Rodin’s contribution to modern sculpture was not only the seeds of abstraction, which is how his fragmentation of the body and fractured surfaces have often been interpreted. Subsequent sculptors did interpret this as a stylistic attitude toward verisimilitude, but Rodin’s strategy was more complex. It involved redirecting the viewer’s attention from image to object as the site at which his hand would be most visible. The point is not that the marks are “fake” but that their emphatic overlay on the sculptural object -- across its material transcriptions -- effects a shift in what the viewer looks for in the sculptures. This is the basis of Rodin’s “liberation” of sculpture and what has been called the demise of the tradition of the statue. Simply put, after Rodin, there were, increasingly, sculptures, not statues -- that is, objects, not images. Rodin’s performative marks strategically masquerade as direct traces in order to convince the viewer that this untouched object had been touched by him.

Perhaps nowhere is this juxtaposition between image and object -- between statue and sculpture -- and the artist’s role in distinguishing between the two more apparent than in the “Hand of Rodin with Female Figure,” and kind of image/object hybrid that Rodin created in 1917. Reproduced here…

...one can easily see why Getsy chose it as the cover image for his book. Rodin’s mastery of both styles are aggressively on display -- the hyper-realistic hand, modeled after his very own, gently cradling a lumpy, broken, but still clearly feminine torso. Here the artist and his art are shown in Rodin’s preferred way, telegraphing to the viewer not only what he has done, but what he is capable of.

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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.