“The Kiss” (Le Baiser)
Luxembourg, Paris
There is no affectation in reading a profound philosophy into the sculptures of such an artist as Rodin. The nature of the greatest art is such that profundity of thought cannot be divorced from a supreme work. He is not a conscious preacher and moralist. But he is impelled to bear witness to the eternal verities which manifest themselves in nature in the form of beauty. A Turner feels their message in the light and colour of the sky and sea, a Correggio in the glint of the hair or the soft skin of a woman. A sculptor like Rodin gazes upon a well-shaped throat, follows the lines of a well-poised trunk or the bend of a strong man’s loins, and cries, with John Addington Symonds:
“I know not anything more fair than thou.—
God give me strength to feel thee, power to speak
Through this dumb clay and marble all the thoughts
That rise within my spirit while I gaze!—
What saith the Scripture? ‘In His image God
Shaped man, and breathed into his nostrils breath
Of life.’—Here then, as nowhere else, shines God;
The Thought made flesh, the world’s soul breathing soft
And strong, not merely through those lips and eyes,
But in each flawless limb, each mighty curve,
Each sinew moulded on the moving form.”
With such a belief Rodin, naturally, rarely drapes his figures. He holds that not only the head and the hand, but every part of the body, expresses human emotion. Again he says: “I never give my model a pose. It is my habit to let them wander about the studio as they will. They rest or move as their mood may dictate. I thus become familiar with every natural, unforced movement of the human body.” In his “St. John the Baptist,” Rodin worked from a model who had never posed before. Before he commenced, he asked the man to raise his arm and begin walking. A moment later he cried: “There now, stop.” The result was a statue organically true, and showing a fine spontaneity which is in the strongest contrast to the highly conventionalized figures of the academics.
Finally, Rodin’s technique and, particularly, the quality in his modelling which has earned him the title of the “First of the Impressionist Sculptors.”
The absence of sharp definition which characterizes Rodin’s later work is evidently based upon principles closely allied to those of the impressionist painter. By relying upon masses of colour, light and shade, the latter secures breadth and an impression of unity which a too rigid adherence to line often destroys. By exaggerating the contour in one place, and by lessening the outline here and sharpening it there, Rodin seeks to get closer to the natural effect produced by the action of light and shadow upon the natural object than a sculptor who relies upon pure form alone.
The case of the sculptor, however, differs considerably from that of the painter. It is, of course, obvious that form is, in a sense, a mere convention, whether in painting or sculpture. No one can argue that the eye has any immediate knowledge of form, any more than it can be said that lines really exist in nature. But form is a convention which every sculptor, from Phidias to Donatello, and from Michael Angelo to Houdon, has accepted. True, no sculptor is concerned with form and form only. Michael Angelo did not forget that his formal arrangements—to describe the figures of “Dawn” and “Night” in the baldest possible terms—would be seen by the aid of the sun and through the Florentine atmosphere. But it is a long cry from this intelligent use of light and shade to the ultra-modern justification for the distorted grotesques of such a sculptor as Rosso. Here are Rosso’s words:
“Art must be nothing else than the expression of some sudden sensation given us by light. There is no such thing as painting or sculpture. There is only light.”
AUGUSTE RODIN