Rodin_2011

the task of reading Balzac’s 17 -volume masterpiece, La Comédie Humaine . He also traveled to the Tours region to study and sketch the physiognomies of men who hailed from Balzac’s place of birth. Rodin even contacted Balzac’s tailor to order a suit made to Balzac’s stout dimensions ( 42 -inch waist; 27 -inch inseam). Between 1891 and 1898 , Rodin produced more than twenty head studies of Balzac and about as many clothed and nude figure studies. He experimented with different poses, attitudes, ages, and types of clothing, but eventually determined that the writer must appear in a majestic, standing pose, draped in his famous Dominican robe. Though it is not possible to fully reconstruct the sequence of the studies, scholars have long described a general progression from a fairly naturalistic portrait of Balzac to a more symbolic embodiment of Balzac’s creative authority and vitality. The present work is derived from the final version of the statue. Among many of the earlier versions of the head that was to crown the figure are several based on sketches of the so-called ‘conductor of Tours,’ and an older-looking head whose thick neck sat atop a striding figure. In the final version of the statue, the subject’s body is at its most abstract, and the head is at its most powerful. Rodin has exaggerated his subject’s mane of hair, bulging brow and abundant mustache, and has modeled the eyes in deep, dramatic recesses: not only for expressive ends, but also in response to the monumental theme, scale, and site of the commission. In a statement made in 1897 , around the time that he was modeling this final version of the head, Rodin remarked to a journalist: I do not want to put my Balzac on a small cupboard, a trunk, or bookshelves, but on stone. I have sought to express the character, the power of the great novelist to the exclusion of all other aspects of his work. The severity of my project is destined to glorify not a man of the mind, but a man of genius. ( Le Temps , January 11 , 1892 ). Rodin completed his Balzac in a plaster version in May 1898 and submitted it to the Salon . Though the sculpture was initially praised by a number of writers, it soon drew enough ridicule from reviewers and reporters—“a block of salt caught in a shower,” “a seal,” “a bag of plaster,” “a snowman in a bathrobe whose empty sleeve suggests a strait jacket” were some of the descriptions on offer—that Rodin’s Balzac was rejected by the Société des Gens de Lettres. Rodin’s champions in the artistic and literary world were aghast. They published a formal statement of support and began a subscription to fund the realization of Balzac in bronze, and the “ affaire Balzac” ’ was launched with the same passionate partisanship—and by many of the same people—as the contemporaneous ‘affaire Dreyfus.’ Rodin wanted no part in the battle; he thanked his supporters, declined the subscription, and brought his plaster Balzac home to Meudon. It was not until decades after his death that Balzac was installed as a public monument, on the corner of the Boulevards Montparnasse and Raspail in Paris. Rodin’s bitter experience with the patrons of the Balzac does not seem to have lessened his own regard for the work—at least not after acquiring some temporal distance from the rejection of 1898 . The often-cited statement by Rodin to Paul Gsell in 1907 aptly conveys Rodin’s aims in the Balzac :