The Thinker
The Pantheon, Paris
It cannot be denied that if Rosso’s works are viewed from a given distance, the proportions are rectified by the play of light and shade, and that the result is a surprising illusion of life. But, regarded as statues, the things are little more than fascinating tricks.
In such an absolute sense as this, the term “impressionist” cannot properly be applied to Rodin. It may, however, be used in another and broader sense as indicating an artist who seeks to express the synthesis of things as he sees them under the influence of a mood.
Rodin knows that he is neither a contemporary of Phidias nor Donatello. He rightly refuses to confine himself to forms which the Athenians and the Florentines happened to find most suitable for the expression of their experience. This is the simple justification for much that is regarded as iconoclastic in his artistic creed. When he cries: “Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of the clean, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures,” Rodin merely asserts a closer kinship with the Gothic than the Greek ideal. Whether Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles are right and Rodin wrong, matters little. The all-important question is whether Rodin’s reliance upon the ridges which express spiritual tension, and his willingness to utilize tortuous poses which a Greek would have rejected, have enabled him to sound a new note of passion in sculpture. We hold that they have.
It is too early to judge of the value of this new note. A hundred years hence the world will be able to give a decision. A contemporary can only see a man who expresses what he feels, strongly and fearlessly.