Rodin at the Royal Academy, London
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Rodin at the Royal Academy, London |
by Paul Murphy
Bernard Shaw said, “Shakespeare is no more a popular author than Rodin is a popular sculptor or Richard Strauss a popular composer”. This exhibition at the RA gives the modern person a chance to test this Shavian nostrum against all the flotsam and jetsam of experience that might have crossed and crossed again the roofs, floors and spaces of memory since Shaw viewed these pieces of sculpture and, indeed, posed as The Thinker (in a typical display of Shavian arrogance/bravura). One of the curators told me that Rodin had his students do the actual sculpting, we also know of some of the ‘borrowings’ he may or may not have made from the work of Camille Claudel, an archetypal 19th/20th century ‘madwoman in the attic’. Recently revived as the subject of a film, she still is clearly a fountainhead of fascination for feminists and post-feminists. Perhaps Camille Claudel is the hidden presence behind the sculptures, many of which detail the male nude as an intellectualised or intellectual, rational subject, the female nude as an erotic object. Perhaps Rodin fails to break through the typical prejudices and conventions of his era, sometimes his sculpture seems camp, if taken in the sense of failed seriousness. But this may have been a revolutionary aesthetic for the time, taken in the light of the previous failed seriousness of Michaelangelo or even Donatello. Yes, The David also appears a little camp, but is amazingly refreshing in contrast to the austere, dour Medieval ikons it replaced. A revolutionary artwork can only fail in terms of a lack of a sense of humour. Michaelangelo certainly had one, but Rodin? His work exudes a pretentiousness that is at once alluring and a little off-putting. Famous sculptures, Balzac almost growing out of the ground, his head wrapped around with a gaze like a large, amazed owl. The Thinker is monumental, exuding neo-classicism or a fascinating backwards look at the Greeks and all their intellectual turmoil. Rodin’s sculptures seem almost caught between the past and modernity. There is no clear breakthrough into abstract but a dividing line between the wholly realised individual typified by The David and the uniform (or uniformed) person of 20th century Totalitarian iconography. Clearly someone has to stand up for the person and Rodin does that.
I take ‘Rodin’ to be a trope including the famous sculptor, his students, Camille Claudel and all the rest of the people who made up the collective effort, resulting in these sculptures. ‘Rodin’ may also be a ‘signifying machine’, a set of signifiers and signified, list of connotations, an occasion or a resonance. We can set his work in context, either ours, the sculptures or the years in which his work left behind its relevance to be something else, such as an artillery turret, a Marne fortress or a frightening white owl in a darkened museum. Incidentally, the sculptures are very user friendly for the amateur sketcher, as this reviewer discovered. It is so much easier to find out what really makes sculpture tick when they are all drawn either lucidly or in roughened, abstract hues.