This month's museum pick...

Musée Rodin in Paris

by Dea Adria Mallin

“All the beings created by Rodin live and breathe.”

                                                                        Anatole France   

On Tuesdays, when most of the museums in Paris are closed, Musée Rodin, at 77, Rue de Varenne, is open. That might be sufficient cause to visit, but the real reason is that Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is the father of modern sculpture – a position won by persevering in the face of relentless insult and outrage – and that the talent is so prodigious that we owe ourselves the opportunity to immerse in Rodin.

The museum is housed in the former Hôtel de Biron, a mansion cum garden, vast and designed in the rocaille style in 1730 as a masterpiece of columns and pediments. In succession, it housed the immensely wealthy, saw public balls in its halls, became a convent school and had its gold-and-white paneling ripped out by a mother superior who smelled materialism, and eventually became the subdivided artists’ studios of such luminaries as Isadora Duncan, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Rodin.

When the French government bought the mansion in 1911, it emerged, despite severe opposition by some politicians and academicians, as a “Rodin museum” – after Rodin agreed to donate his entire oeuvre. In 1919, two years after Rodin’s death, the museum opened its doors -- and what doors they are --  to the public.

While there is more than one backstory in Rodin’s life, it is important to note that he failed three times to be admitted to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and in being denied, Rodin was essentially liberated from their rules. Putting sensation and emotion before the classical tenets and stringent academic convention in sculpture, Rodin used exaggeration and gesture to accurately render feeling and meaning and to give his sculpture the very throb of life.

Wildly celebrated yet wildly controversial in his lifetime, Rodin paid the price of innovation right up to his demise. Even as the French Impressionists, as a movement, freed up painting for the breakthroughs of the 20^th century, Rodin single-handedly freed sculpture from dogma and restored the tactile values of movement, rhythm, plasticity, and life force.

On the Rue de Varenne, after paying the entrance fee at the corner, wander in the large and rather formal garden and note that it becomes intimate whenever you encounter a Rodin sculpture. His most well-known works in the garden include the eternally absorbed Thinker, the harrowing Ugolino and his Children, the equally harrowing Gates of Hell, and The Burghers of Calais.

Shown first in 1889, public enthusiasm for The Burghers of Calais was undermined by sneers from the academy. Yet when the blind Helen Keller visited in 1937 and ran her fingers along each of the burghers, she noted that they were “sadder to touch than a grave.” Rodin himself called the work “a living rosary of suffering and sacrifice.” Look to the exaggeration in the feet and particularly the hands. Rodin modeled the hands separately, seeking intensity of expression in hands that pray and hands that weep, hands that question and hands that give in, hands that bless and hands that blaspheme.  

Today, the piece is exhibited as Rodin wished – not on a high pedestal but on the lawn, where Everyman can rub shoulders, indeed feel the passion and anguish of these burghers who willingly sacrificed their lives so that the citizens of Calais could live.

Also in the garden is the sculpture of Honoré de Balzac, his cape, face, and stance so dynamic that when I last visited, he emerged from the garden’s lime and linden trees almost to “speak.” The impetuous movement of the drapery seems to merge with the head and hair, and the torque and tension between torso, limbs, and head impel the immovable bronze to breathe the fevered intoxication of Balzac’s creativity. Today, few would argue with the power, energy, or substance of this sculpted Balzac, yet the first exhibition by Rodin of a plaster cast of Balzac unleashed outrage. Rodin persevered and started again, making three, four, ten models, yet the Balzac affair, like the contemporaneous Dreyfus affair, unleashed a storm. Though he had much support from abroad and from such artists as Monet, Rodin met with scorn in Paris for putting sensation and emotion before established sculptural practice. The sculpture was not given a public place in Paris until 1939.

Nor was Rodin’s dropping of the 19^th century convention of the pedestal construction well met. Rodin was accused of denying the base. Instead, like Michelangelo, whom he had studied in Florence, Rodin often let his figures merge with the seemingly unfinished base of the stone itself, expressing his awe at the mystery of form “awakening” from within the stone.  

Inside the museum, the rooms are so pleasingly arranged that the chronological progression of Rodin’s work is easily followed in the nearly 500 works (of a total of over 6,000 works owned by the museum) on display. To be sure, everyone gazes, transfixed, on The Kiss, and many pose beside it for the camera, as if the human ecstasy that seems to flow through the marble could be captured and held. (In 1893, when The Kiss was exhibited in Chicago, it was accessible only to visitors with a special pass.)

In The Cathedral, comprised of two hands in an attitude of prayer, it usually escapes the viewer that he is observing two right hands. Rodin found that two opposed thumbs lacked the prayerful feeling, the emotion he was attempting to render. In fact, Rodin usually depicted only right hands, with the exception of The Hand of the Devil, in which Satan’s left hand is used to crush humanity.

In contrast to the concentrated and tense force of Rodin’s bronzes are the forty restored marble pieces. Pause at The Danaid, whose curves undulate as the finely polished white marble surfaces let the light glide like a caress over the radiant body of the young female figure, in deliberate contrast to the secondary parts left in a rough state.

The museum also exhibits Rodin’s drawings, conserves 8,000 photographs of his works, and shows Rodin’s personal collection of paintings by masters as eminent as Van Gogh, Renoir, and Monet. Van Gogh’s Les Moissoneurs holds the viewer in acres of wheat, its farmer lost in a field of gold while in the distance, the city encroaches.

And then there is the room containing Rodin’s Sculptor with his Muse. Another backstory. Not to be forgotten for a moment. The 43-year-old Rodin was the sculptor. The 19-year-old Camille Claudel (1864-1943) was the muse. She became his pupil, his model, and his lover of many years. Her relationship with Rodin unfortunately eclipsed the power of her work, but the critic Mirabeau called Claudel “a rebellion against nature: a woman of genius!” The more time spent in the room that Rodin dedicated to her sculptures, the more we are convinced of Claudel’s immense talent. And yet, Claudel spent half of her life locked in a hospital for the insane.

When Claudel finally understood that Rodin would not leave Rose Beuret (who managed his household, was also his lover, companion, and mother of his son, and finally his wife in old age, two weeks before she died), she turned her love of Rodin into a singular hatred. Claudel’s mother had rejected her daughter from infancy and was repulsed by her liaison, sans marriage, to Rodin. Claudel’s father had secretly supported her, but after his early death, her support was left to her brother, the writer Paul Claudel. His political aspirations would not tolerate his sister’s scandalous connection or subsequent erratic behavior, so he used a lax French law to drag Camille from her apartment and hide her away in a mental institution for thirty years. Friends who visited her thought her quite sane, as did the hospital staff, who tried to release her, but her mother and brother would not have her. That Rodin dedicated a room to her work indicates that their commingling had deep resonances; it is one of the most fascinating rooms in the museum, and the most sad.

The French Connection

Rodin’s connection to the United States began in 1876, when he sent eight early sculptures to the Centennial Exposition in Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. Fast forward to 1923, five years after Rodin’s death. On a visit to Paris, Jules Mastbaum (1872-1926), the man who was the largest operator of movie theaters in the United States, was captivated by the smallest bronze sculpture, Hand, in a shop window. Overwhelmed by its powerful human emotion, Mastbaum bought the piece, inquired about the artist, and an obsession was born which would lead to the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, with the finest public display of Rodin’s work outside Paris.  

In the three years between that visit and his own unexpected death, Mastbaum commissioned a majority of the works in the Paris collection of the Musée Rodin. There were 128 pieces of Rodin’s intimate as well as monumental works, a feat that could only have been possible because Rodin, in willing his entire estate to the French government, had to also give permission to make casts of his work after his death.   

Most spectacularly, Mastbaum ordered not one but two bronze casts of The Gates of Hell, at a cost of one million francs each. Considered Rodin’s masterpiece, on which he’d toiled for 37 years, the work had never been cast during Rodin’s lifetime, but thanks to Mastbaum, the monumental doors adorn the portico of the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia and are prominent in the garden in the Paris museum.

The French connection continued in Mastbaum’s choice of landscape architect Jacques Gréber of Paris, the man who conceived the grand boulevard design of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, who sited the museum here, and who did the layout for the museum’s extraordinary garden. The museum itself was designed by University of Pennsylvania professor Paul Philippe Cret, a Frenchman. And when the museum opened its doors, one of the invited guests was the French ambassador to the United States, Paul Claudel – the very brother of Camille Claudel.

I have lived on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, catty-corner to the Rodin Museum, for more than two decades. Sometimes I traverse its garden, or I go inside to revisit favorites. From my terrace, in winter when the stately trees are bare, I can see The Thinker, situated powerfully in front of the museum’s entry gates, ornamental pond, and bronze doors. It is never enough, and so I find reason to walk past the sculpture regularly. I have seen it when a slant of summer sun alights on the figure’s strong back and arms, and when the late autumn leaves cluster and blow into his face, and when a snowfall blankets him in the night or icicles freeze on his brow. And I would have to report that even more than I see The Thinker, I feel him -- in his quest to uncover the mystery of things, in his yearning for the absolute and the eternal…