THE STATUE PARIS REJECTED: RODIN'S BALZAC.

Otago Witness, Issue 2676, 28 June 1905, Page 69

THE STATUE PARIS REJECTED: RODIN'S BALZAC.

On hearing' of its rejection, Rodin said :1 "I was cruelly hurt, and made ill. and) it did me great harm." A brilliant pamphlet was forthcoming, however, by Arsene Alexandre. which suggested to aft least part of the intelligent spectators that "they may' have laughed too soon." The Balzao has held, during the Exposition, chief place in the Pavilion Rodin, where! those who still seek for its stimulus to laughter may find it, and where others may study it to calm advantage. France's* greatest novelist, the writer of fche "ComedieJ Humane," as conceived and made to exist in sculptured form by a man like Rodin, is a combination in itself not without interest. There is in this work a' toeniendous, almost savage, force, a virility and powei\ an abandonment to subject above form, characteristic of Rodin. Balzac is posed* as a spectator his arms folded across the chest under the flowing monk's robe winch, tfc© novelist assumed when at work. His body is rested on one backward-drawn foot, whilst the other, a little advanced, throws out the line of leg and knee. Tie head, superb and massive, is lifted and backward inclined ; the lips are parted : the eyes, deep seb, caverns of thoughts under heavy brows, look out at the defile of humanity which th© romancer so keenly studied to immortal results. This Balzao is moqueur, reveur, student, analyst ; ancs the g«nius which has — roughly, if you will,— mightily modelled the Titian of literature, has finely comprehended, with the kinship of greatness, the type of the immortal Parisian. The stupendous figure has nothing: in common with the approved style of statues to great men thifc mark the public* places and squares of our cities and towns, and there is everything in the outrance of presentation, the novel, daring, crude handling, to bewilder the crowd who distrust what they fail to understand. But it is sufficient for the serious, unprejudiced observer to come once and look, to return and gaze, in order to recognise that he is before a masterpiece — the effigy of a human being apnearing as in life from a flowing garment, "symbol of the art of the romancer, the robe of imagination with which he. enveloped his analyses. It becomes thus impossible not to feel the power of Rodin's Balzac as 0113 studies the gigantic head ■emerging from the drapery as the author liff-5 his eyes on the comedy of life. — T.P. ? Weekly.

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