Rodin_2011

Musée Rodin, and executor of Rodin’s artistic estate, presented Neyt with the terracotta head in 1924 . It is one of several sculptures in the artist’s estate that were distributed to specific friends and family members according to Rodin’s instructions Auguste Neyt was a young soldier stationed in the Belgian suburb of Ixelles when Rodin first laid eyes on him in 1875 . The sculptor had been working there since 1871 , in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, often in the employ of other artists. At the age of 35 , August Rodin had yet to create a major work. A lapse in lucrative projects during an 18 -month period in 1875 – 7 6 finally allowed him to pursue a carefully-laid plan to complete a life-sized nude—his first “ grande figure .” A crucial part of the plan was the choice of model. He had come to prefer non-professional models, someone who would not be tempted to assume the standard academic poses, but for this work he also required a young, well-built man with considerable physical stamina. Deciding that a soldier would be suitable, he asked an acquaintance, an army commander, if he could look at some candidates.Years later, in conversation with the American sculptor, Truman Bartlett, Rodin recalled his first impression of Neyt: “A Flemish youth, of twenty-two years of age . . . a fine, noble-hearted boy, full of fire and valor” (Bartlett, 1889 , cited in Albert Elsen, ed., 19 6 5 , p. 31 ). Neyt himself recalled that he had been selected among a group of nine soldiers who were considered “the best- built.” The posing sessions were long and grueling, driven by Rodin’s notions of naturalism, and its requirements. Neyt remembered that: “I was at once introduced to his studio in the rue Sans-Souci in Ixelles, where I had to go through all kinds of poses every day in order to get the muscles right. Rodin did not want any exaggerated muscle, he wanted naturalness. I worked one, two, three and even four hours a day and sometimes for an hour at a stretch. ” 1 Recollections such as these have furnished historians with an unusually rich account of one sculptor’s working relationship with a specific model, on a single sculpture. Certainly, the testimonies of the artist and his model were at least partly prompted by the first and greatest trauma of Rodin’s career: the fact that his work was accused by some viewers, including members of the Salon jury, of having been cast from a mold made directly from the body, rather than having been modeled. In an effort to vindicate his himself, Rodin sent the jury a cache of evidence, including photographs that he asked Neyt to have taken of himself in the pose of The Age of Bronze . The photographer was instructed to take these shots at exactly the same angle and distance from Neyt as in his photographs of the sculpture in plaster. Rodin scholars have variously dismissed the suspicions voiced by some of Rodin’s contemporaries. As is shown most poignantly in the terracotta head, Rodin’s departures from Neyt’s facial features are easily evident. As Ruth Butler has observed, in his modeling of the head and expression of The Age of Bronze, “ Rodin emphasized a structure that was angular and bony, a face with thin lips, avoiding Neyt’s rounded chin, with its cute dimple in the middle. He decided to close the eyes and open the mouth of the figure, thus introducing an emotional note. The expression, together with the raised arms and the hesitant forward movement, present the viewer with an enigmatic image of a man opening himself up to pain.” 2 Additionally, scholars such as Leo Steinberg, Albert Elsen, and Antoinette Le Normand-Romain have discussed different ways in which Rodin’s approach to the naturalistic modeling of the nude, an approach that was partly informed by 19 th century aesthetic theory,