Auguste Rodin
French, 1840-1917

Walking Man, 1903 cast
bronze with gilding
33 1/2 x 23 9/16 x 10 7/16 in.

SBMA, Museum purchase with funds provided by General Acquisition Fund
1997.9



Rodin photographed in 1906 by Alvin Langdon Coburn, and images above showing the evolution of the Walking Man sculpture. (L to R) “St. John the Baptist Preaching” (1878) bronze, “Walking Man” (1878-1900), “The Torso” (1878-1900).

"Man's naked form belongs to no particular moment in history; it is eternal, and can be looked upon with joy by the people of all ages." - Auguste Rodin


RESEARCH PAPER

Few European artists achieved the notoriety and fame in their own lifetime as did Auguste Rodin. A scandal surrounded the AGE OF BRONZE, his first polished and carefully detailed nude male-figure, that he had submitted to the Paris Salon for exhibition in 1877 under its original title THE VANQUISHED. While in Brussels in 1875, he had completed that precise anatomical study of a young Belgian soldier. So exact was he in sculpting the contour of this figure as well as in the planes of the head and shoulders as they related to the feet, that he was accused of having molded the clay over the living form. This accusation caused him great pain. To avoid ever creating such a suspicion about his following works, he thereafter worked to expressed human emotion and ideas through his starkly, strikingly unique style of modeling of the human form. He sought to achieve this by modeling torsos in various mediums whose seeming mobility and energy recalled the straining muscular forms of Michelangelo figures as well as resembling the fragments of classical marble torsos. The surfaces were noticeably rough and deeply carved, or even gouged, to catch the light. From the various vantage points that Rodin studied his model, he learned that by exaggerating the muscle definition and creating deep shadows, the light playing on the sculpture’s surface would reflect to the observer, seeming to give animation and life to it. 


In his studio, Rodin accumulated numerous casts in clay and plaster of studies of his favorite model, an Italian peasant named Pignatelli, whose natural way of moving and standing appealed to the sculptor’s sense of creating a life-like quality in his attempt to break with the traditional formal poses of other male models. Rodin saved a variety of fragments from his earlier studio studies of Pignatelli. From among those, he selected a torso and a pair of striding legs which he reworked and combined to eventually fashion into THE WALKING MAN. It was here that he made the step from a traditional static statue to a mobile, balanced sculpture, not needing arms or head, until then considered necessary for a sculture to appear complete. Accounts said that he made it clear that it was his intention that this headless and armless figure was a finished work of art when it was exhibited at his first retrospective at the Exhibition
Universale in Paris in 1900.(RODIN by Albert Elsen) . Before that time, he called the work a study for ST JOHN THE BAPTIST, (which had a head and arms) and he did not exhibit THE WALKING MAN until the public had become used to his unique style.



The Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s own figure of THE WALKING MAN was cast in bronze in 1903 by the renowned foundry of Alexis Rudier, which produced most of Rodin’s early bronzes and was owned by the English artist and sculptor, Henry Moore. Moore even recognized that “Rodin helped open the eyes of modern sculptors to the validity of the fragment, the sketch, the accident and to the importance of ancient sculpture. Moore particularly admired the springiness, tautness, and energy of THE WALKING MAN and noted that like Michelangelo before him, Rodin believed the human body could be as beautiful, dramatic, and eloquent as the face--or more so.”(Elsen,pp29-30) “THE WALKING MAN is not an entirely unified, consistent conception, for it combines a torso and legs that have obvious differences in the relative hardness and softness of their surfaces and the degree of their detailing. The massive legs with their heavy musculature are compactly modeled and would be impressive without the torso.”(Elson,p32) “ The torso has been battered by ripping and cutting actions, so that its surface is more densely inflected, and there are rougher passages between the raised areas; there is also slightly less illusionistic modeling of the muscles. More than any other of Rodin’s works, this sculpture overwhelms the viewer by the power of movement.” (Elsen,p32) “No sculptor before Rodin had made such a basic, simple event as walking the exclusive focus of his art.” (Elsen,p32). It was with this kind of guided focus that Rodin made a breakthrough. In a symbolic way, he was showing that more could be seen by suggesting the whole from just observing a part. “In 1878, Rodin was passionately involved with the body as a marvelous organism instinctively able to balance itself when in motion. In addition, the hard surface with its variegated modeling partly absorbs light but also violently repels it.” (Elsen,p32). Somehow, it was a striking realization for that time, a technological breakthrough that a part can be the whole, and variegated modeling results in animation.



By no means does most of Rodin’s oeuvre just reflect the rough surface of THE WALKING MAN, nor have his other works been mere fragments; although the bronze sculpture of his own hand holding a lump of clay from which mankind is evolving, called HAND OF GOD, is a more powerful statement than a full body. While a large number of his creations are of traditional subjects of his time, it was through his repertoire of natural gestures, poses, and facial expressions that he conveyed to his viewers the personality of a person or the message his personal perception wished to project. When we look at his other works, we can realize that even there we begin to understand what he was doing beyond merely portraying a figure.



He had broken from the accepted studio rules, cliches, and formulas to bring the revolutionary idea of naturalness and expression to his work. For Rodin, the artist’s truth was a felt experience whose impact was forced upon the viewer by his selection and concentration on parts and portraying what he saw, what he thought, and what he felt about a subject. He opened a large window for viewers to have meaningful emotional encounters with his sculptures, and thus viewing
them would no longer be an impersonal experience. It was not just his intention for his perceptions and approaches to art to serve as a link to future artists, but rather for them to rediscover the links to the classic artists of the ancient Greeks and Gothics. His subjects and titles often recalled the thoughts of philosophers and the literature of those times past. His success in crossing the time dimension, reinforcing how early ‘classic’ works connected to `modern’ ones, revealed the timelessness of all true art. It took many years of study, observation, and practical experience to reach these insights.



It certainly seems clear that Rodin’s work as a sculptor and choice of subjects was influenced strongly by his early experience. He was born in Paris on November 12, 1840, and received typical French religious upbringing and Catholic school education until age 9. At that time he began showing artistic promise by his drawings on scraps of paper at home, but he showed little academic promise as a student. His later attendance at a boarding school did not make a better academic student of him (which some biographers attribute to the fact that it might have been his myopia which interfered with his participation.) By the age of 13 he was enrolled in the Petite Ecole where he received the brief and only formal art instruction of his life. While traveling in Italy, his exposure to engravings by Michelangelo and Raphael influenced his artistic style and enforced his desire to become a sculptor. At 15 he was admitted to a sculpture class taught by a teacher named Fort. But he could not yet pursue a career in sculpture. Economics, political upheaval and wars in France forced him to earn his living by becoming an apprentice at different times to various artisans from whom he learned to be a goldsmith, a plaster molder, an ornamenter of porcelain, a decorator of buildings, and a sculptor of marble. “ It wasn’t until the age of 37 that he finally achieved personal recognition as a result of the scandal that arose
regarding his nearly perfect sculpture, the AGE OF BRONZE. In 1871, he finally won the third place medal for his life-size AGE OF BRONZE sculpture and commissions followed. If Rodin had died at age 40, he would have been a forgotten artist. However by age 50 he had won several important sculpture commissions, and by the age of 60 he was without peers. In his later years he received commissions from the rich and the royal as well as many international honors.” (Dale Tetalman)



By no means did Rodin live his life as a monk who dedicated his life to his work alone. In 1864, he met Rose Beuret who became his model and later became his mistress. She remained his mistress and faithful to him until her death in 1917. She was often his model, and assisted him by keeping his clay figures moist to prevent their cracking and
breaking in his unheated studios. She bore him a son in 1866, but to whom he only gave his given name, Auguste, but not his surname. The boy was named Auguste Eugene Beuret . Although Rose remained faithful to him, Rodin had many liasons during his lifetime. The longest was with a sculptress, Camile Claudel, who became his mistress (1883-1898) as well as a collaborator, (making many of the casts of small hands and feet for his sculptures) and his model for several of his works. He finally married Rose the same year that both of them died, 1917, when he was 77 years old.

He was a man with multiple passions, and he found a unique way to mold them into his sculptures and into his art. 
Rodin’s early notoriety from his early, nearly perfect sculpture, and later with women, hardly compares to his fame from the effects his insights, perceptions and approaches had on the art of sculpting in modern times. He had the courage and the will to break with traditional dogma and to open windows to the processes of breathing naturalness, expression, mobility, energy, and psychology into sculpture. He showed that a fragment was not only as powerful as a
whole, but also allows the observer’s exposure to become a fused emotional, intellectual, and aesthetic experience. He thus started a revolution in modern art, and his insight into the human condition reflects in each sculpture, including WALKING MAN, that symbolic quality of all true artistic creation.



Prepared for SBMA Docent website by Eunice Drell, June 2003



BIBLIOGRAPHY:

RODIN, Albert E. Elsen, Museum of Modern Art, New York, distributed by
Doubleday & Co., New York, 1963

Garber, Marian L, Docent Research Paper, November 5, 1992

Tetalman, Dale, Docent Research Paper, (undated)

Allen, Vicki,SBMA News release, November 24, 1997
Editorial Credit must be given to Lawrence Johnson, PhD., Professor of
Linguistics and English, Santa Barbara, CA.,


POSTSCRIPT

French Master Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917) deconstructed models and plasters in his studio in order to find an entirely new breadth in them and revitalize the waning power of sculpture in the late 19th Century. His powerful “Walking Man” was, in and of itself, a deconstruction and rebuilding of his “St. John the Baptist Preaching”. “Walking Man” was, in turn, deconstructed again to become its simplest of parts, “The Torso”. “Recently I have taken to isolating limbs, the torso” He notes. “Why am I blamed for it? Why is the head allowed and not portions of the body? Every part of the human figure is expressive.”

While some have hypothesized that the “Torso” and “Walking Man” were studies for the “St. John”, photographic and documentary evidence shows that Rodin deconstructed the model to its simplest parts in an effort to illustrate the decay of time. Rodin presented us with a perfect classical Cathedral and then reduced it to ruins. In doing so, he opened the doorway to modern sculptors who had never imagined a contemporary sculptor endeavoring to create a ruin from the start. This innovation gave rise and inspirations to modernists such as Bourdelle, Archipenko, Brancusi and Arp to further simplify and modernize their own works to an even greater extent. An item of classical beauty can seen as a broken rock to another set of eyes.




'Walking Man has everything that I love about Rodin, especially his wonderful sense of the human figure', Henry Moore once said. Moore photographing Rodin’s Walking Man, with his assistant John Farnham at Perry Green, March 1967. The SBMA cast is the one Moore once owned.

SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS

This is a reduced replica of a subject originally conceived at nearly life-size. As is still the case today, 19th-century artists would routinely authorize limited editions of such smaller scaled repetitions of their most successful masterpieces. Also typical of Rodin’s working methods, this sculptural idea was derived from an earlier project that the artist took on some twenty years earlier: a striding monumental sculpture of St. John the Baptist. In Rodin’s generative practice, one representational subject often resulted in a flowering of a host of other ideas to which he would return again and again. The artist’s creative fervor is signified through a deliberate fragmentation of the body, sketch-like roughness in the modelling, and a vigor of execution that expresses the explosive vitality of the human form.

- Rodin and His Legacy, 2017