Auguste Rodin [antikvár]

AUGUSTE RODIN Marble Flesh, Bronze Passions Rodin first exhibited his celebrated Gates of Hell in 1900. The Belle Epoque was at his height, and Art Nouveau was all the rage. By contrast, the promethean humanism of the Gates of Hell was at one with Freud's revelations about repressed sexuality and the unconscious. Monumental in scale, Rodin's masterpiece opened up a new world for art. What Van Gogh, Gauguin and Cézanne did for painting, Rodin did single- handed for sculpture. Bridging the centuries in which it seemed that mind had been banished from sculpture, Rodin revived the tradition of the cin- quecento. The inspiration that he drew from the Renaissance, and above all from Michelangelo, flows through his own work to fertilise the work of generations to come. In Michel Seu- phor's words, "It was Rodin who, drawing them forth from their straitjacket of stone, imparted a further shudder of volup- tousness to the 'Slaves' that Michelangelo had blocked out for the Tomb of Julius II." And Rodin himself stated: "The most remote antiquity is my habitat. I want to link the past to the present; to return to memory, judge it, and contrive to complete it. Symbols are the guidelines of humanity. They are no lies." Truth and man's moral stature, these are Rodin's concerns. In his Gates of Hell the influences of Dante's Inferno, Ovid's Metamorphoses and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mai come together in a creativity that owes everything to the "will to power" and the inventiveness hymned by Nietzsche. Rodin is a Michelangelo under the spell of Wagner "Your door is not finished," came the reproach. "And the cathedrals of France: have they been completed?" came the sculptor's reply. Above all, the overwhelming Gates of Hell, with its convulsive out- crop of creatures less voluptuous than despairing, put an abrupt end to the bland academicism which had presided over sculp- ture for so long. True, certain of Rodin's predecessors, such as Houdon and Carpeaux, had wrested the clay into forms spiri- tual or psychological. But what is new in Rodin is the capacity to materialize the most confused and contradictory passions of introspective reality.