Rodin, Gates of hell
Confronting Rodin feels like confronting humanity itself. His modelled works, pulsing with the imprints of his fingertips, acceptingly and comfortingly caress the human condition. One senses the impulse to perfection only in the mode of working–in the repetition, the reworking, in the constant search–for the people thus formed are wholeheartedly embraced as they are. They writhe and struggle with life, they sigh and ache and reflect. They stand before us in all their sorry existence, and though melancholy may tug at us, we are not repulsed by their abortive attempts at living. Rodin coaxes them out of the clay with a peaceful acceptance. He observes them tenderly, he heals their wounds by simply permitting them to be as they are.
Rodin, John the Baptist (preaching to the Americans)
They are naked in every sense: utterly vulnerable, entirely exposed to us. But we merge our disarmed selves with them, we suffer with them, and see our sufferings solidified and externalised outside our private reveries. These rooms are peopled with souls acting out every facet of being human; the living bodies that wander among them are temporarily connected by silent and heavy rock.
Rodin, Balzac (in the wild, Paris)
There is a solemn and honest affirmation of personhood here: there are childish faces, gnarled toes and bulging bellies; there are crooked, pursed lips and untamable hair; skin sometimes sags and is sometimes elastic and firm. Legs bow out and take decisive strides–too wide to be elegantly decorative, too full of purpose. Women–devoured by the eyes of silent, captivated men–are sometimes small and hesitant and girlish rather than voluptuous and consciously seductive. We confront ourselves, in all our variety, we find we are desired, nurtured, spurned and ultimately alone–but visible. I exist, and I am a person.
Rodin, Call to arms
How often we seek something from each other, and search each other out wordlessly, grasping after one another with our hands, with our longing eyes, with the full force of our frail bodies, but though tangled up in one another, we glide past each other. The muse clambers over the sculptor, swaying him with the force of her desperation, melting into a single swirling form with him, but he, lost in his private world, dares not touch her, dares not dissolve the vision, dares not seize what he cannot hold.
Claudel, Vertumne & Pomone
Claudel’s sculptures agree: her women are swept along in waltzes, hanging helplessly from their stony partners whose hands avoid fast contact, limply and reluctantly brushing them. One wonders how many of her thumbprints indent the surface of a Rodin, which fingertips are hers and which are his, how fluidly they merged into one hand. Alone, her sculptures begin to fracture. Waves engulf her figures, bitterness pocks their faces. She sees humanity in all its revoltingness; her hands treat it coarsely, contemptuously. It is vile to be human, her aggressive hand assures us, and I may be a woman but I am not delicate. Perhaps the suffering of women is so acute and carefully masked that it is vicious when it seethes out.
Rodin feels, but does not spit on our weaknesses. He exposes them to turn them over gently in his hands, to comfort us, to reassure us. No body is too disgusting, no act too shameful, no thought too secret–we are all made of the same humble dirt.
Rodin, Walking man, Meudon
And that dirt transcends us. We emerge from rock, we gasp helplessly from inside the rock for a heartbeat, and we sink back into it, and so must it be. A woman crouches with an ornamental vase upon her back in a restful piece, but beside her is the more honest version: she carries, in place of the vase, a jagged piece of rock. We carry our rocks or we merge with them–as Eve buries her face in her tree of knowledge all coiled about by her snake in a single rock of inevitability. We face each other as silent half-carved rocks, each on our own private trajectory of decay. Existence is hard, strange and stubborn: let us look at it and take it as it is, and love it anyway.
