ART AND ARTISTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2914, 19 January 1910, Page 88

ART AND ARTISTS.

RODIN.—“THE SCULPTOR’S SOUL.” “n.T°+i jU ' st l°°i £ at Xatur °.” said Rodin, and the rest happens according to your temperament. ° “ u I heard him say it, hoard the. cheevv okl gentleman who is the first Jiving sculptor aim toe greatest force in modern plastic ait chirp this profound remark one afternoon in his studio m the Rue de I’Universue, lam. Sometimes I think that maxim is tho wisest thing said in our generation. Tne artist of the future will have to realise that there is only himself and the world, seen and unseen., about him: and his business will be merely to write as a letter in words, in paint, or in marble, narrating- his spiritual or material 'adventures. rle will just look at Nature, and tiie rest will topper according to his temper a incut. —Mr Jin noway.— Since I first caught the Rodin fever some years ago in Pans, and through a delirious wcciv tracked all the master’s works that could be seen, tracked the master also to fits lofty lairs, the Paris and Men don studios, not a year has passed but I have written an article or articles on Rodin. This year I hoped I was going to escape. No, it was not to bo! A few days ago came the inevitable request: “Will you do us a couple of columns on Rodin, based on the accompanying album, published' by Mr Fisher Unwin at 5s net, text by Gustav© Raim, and 44 tinted illustrations and two engravings?” I looked through the album, grazed at the strange, startling, stimulating illustrations, all familiar, yet, all unfamiliar, because a work of genius always has the- life-communicating quality ever new. Then I closed the alburn, did it up in, a an s 't n ‘offl to Mr Jinneway. Who is Mr Jinneway? lie is an honest

t man, an egg merchant, a hardy student of art, a little old-fashioned, whose opinion is valuable because it is always independent. We had had many a. bout over Rodin in the old days, and I was curious to loam if with a-d'vanoing years Mr .7 i are way’s opinions had undergone any change. While the parcel was on the way to my old friend I sat down to try if I could say something* very simply and very briefly, about Rodin. —Ths Man and His Work.— All do not like ins work. Many dislike it. They find it unfinished, odd, ■emotional, unlike the works of sculpture to which they have been accustomed; unlike the calm beauty of the masterpieces of the Greeks, who, they havo been taught, reached the highest ideals of sculpture, and said the final word upon it, as if there could bo any finality in a world which may last millions of years’. When. Rodin was born there was born *. man destined to look and to act quite independently of the way anybody before him had looked or acted. He studied the masters of ths past and then ignored them, which is the only right way. To him it was nothing than his forerunners had not introduced into sculpture atmosphere, and all the varying ■emotions that stir and torture man and woman,. He felt the call to do it, and he did it; but not at first. His progress from realism to idealism, from matter to spirit, was slow but sure. The first work he exhibited at the Salon, “The Man with; the Broken Nose,’’ was ruthless realism, sheer individuality. Years passed. Then the poet, the seer, the brooder that larks behind the cheerful bourgeois exterior of Rodin produced “ The Sculptor’s, Soul.” Describe it? I cannot. Info broken marble he has wrought the idea of the j sculptor’s soul, a meagre, ■ pathetic form, j half-child, half-woman, emerging from a | chaotic torso, a. thing of light, nursed, as j it were, in mighty materials arms. —A Foot | Rodin is a poet. Ho never sees .any- | thing ‘in the common way. When he was , asked for a Balzac monument he did not | proceed to design a figure of the novelist j from a lithograph or dra wing: he saw in j bis mind’s eye the symbol of Balzac, saw } him as the incarnation of Will and Labour, one man writing with his poor hand the tale of the human comedy, and so the statue came to life anc! l was loathed, except by the few. Likewise to him the idea of John the Baptist was news—wonderful news —for the world, so he made the Baptist striding forward proclaiming his tidings to all the earth. And his Claude Lor rain —Claude, who, according to Rue kin, was the first painter “to set the sun in the sky’’—Rodin set him aloft gazing at the sun, while the Chariot of Light dashes up from the base of the statue to this sunlover. Of course, Rodin has been ■misunderstood : th© Balzac was rejected, the Claude monument at Nancy aroused a storm of opposition, and would have been rejected had the citizens of Nancy had their way. The last thing that committee? desire is idealism. They foal safe only with the obvious—a man in morning coat and trousers, such as London’s latest statue, the Sir Wilfrid Lawson in the Embankment .Gardens. Think of what Rodin would have made of that: he would havo given us some beautiful arrangement representing the idea for which this apostle of temperance stands, something that would have given us pleasure and stimulation to look upon. —Mr Jinneway’e Criticism.— Mr ,7iniieway has written mo a letter —a most interesting letter —about the Rodin album. He goes a long way towards admiration, but not all the way. He asks (I have never known him jocose before), “Do you contend' that his statue of ‘ Tho Thinker’ suggests a thinking - man, or a blacksmith trying to remember where he left his spanner?” He also objects to Rodin’s statue of “Despair,” which he calls grotesque, adding that “it has tho kind of physical truth which a clever medical man interested in the physical effects of emotion would enunciate.” In answer to these criticisms I will merely say that Rodin never, or rarely, ogives titles to his creations. That is usually done after the work is finished, by some literary friend. He saw the model in _ the attitude that baa been called “Despair”; the attitude evoked certain emotions in him. He cried to her, “Stay as you are,” and ho modelled her thus, concerned only with the light on tho contorted mass and the lines; of the limbs. Most sculptors say, “Ha! I will do a Menus or a Hercules,” and they proceed to pose the model in the attitude that they think consonant with Venus or Hercules. Rodin looks at Nature, and the rest happens according to his temneramant. The vision comes first, the title afterwards. —“The Thinker.”— The name of “The Thinker” was never given by Rodin to that massive, brooding intensity. _ It is an episode of tine mighty woik of his life, begun 20 years ago. etdi unfinished, representing the Gate of Hell in Dante’s saddest and most dreadful canto. This figure sits .above the Gate, primal tiiougiit rapt in the atmosphere of Eternitv, watching sons of men, each instinct with .his particular 1 1 it le ray of tho primal thought, passing through the dark gate 1o the- grave; this brooding figure watches dimly, sadly, the vortex of their passion, and discerns, beyond the agony, the rebirth of tho spirit. Tli-e.ro is really no name for this lonely, all-knowing brooder, this symbol of the thought that thought tha world*, and knew the end from the beginning, to whom the sculptor, brooding on'the idea, has given plastic form. Rodin is a tore?, but not a g'ccrl influence. Tho Jcys-ei in on copy Iris mariner ; th ey cannot copy the genius, the soul that is. bein'*continually being—reborn in his works that seem so hard to understand merely because Room is himself. His group of “Tho Sculpior a Soul should be* .his monument; it is another way of saying—Rodin.—C. Lewis Hind, in T.P.’s Weekly.