Twisted, turning, anguished figures, yearning for something beyond their grasp. The “lumpy dark figures” were seen for the last time this weekend at Pepperdine University — the exhibit’s first stop on a national tour.
“But are these figures the works of a genius?” Michael Zakian, director for Pepperdine’s Frederick R. Weisman museum, asked his audience rhetorically during a farewell gathering on Thursday night.
Dozens of art lovers had come to get a last look at the 30 selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection entitled “Rodin’s Obsession: The Gates of Hell.”
It was a better turnout than Auguste Rodin would have gotten in his own lifetime, explained Zakian about the sculptor who, like most great artists throughout history, was shunned by his peers.
His three-dimensional studies of the human condition contrasted with contemporaneous works by popular and appreciated sculptors like Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi, creator of the Statue of Liberty.
“The Statue of Liberty is just a figure standing with her arm straight up in the air holding a torch,” Zakian pointed out. “There’s no sense of body. She is covered with these heavy robes that just drop to the ground and her facial features are perfectly smooth and symmetrical. So perfect that she doesn’t look real. There’s no sense of life, no sense of a living figure in any way whatsoever.”
In stark contrast, Rodin’s bodies are creatively posed to reflect the temperaments of the subjects.
In one piece, for example, three identical figures pull or are being pulled by an invisible rope that leads towards the earth. Their muscles strain from the intensity of their actions and the unnatural flatness over their heads, necks and shoulders give the impression that a great force is weighing down upon the “Three Shades” (or spirits).
“Perhaps it’s the weight of a sin,” said Zakian. “When it was only one figure, the name of the piece was ‘Adam’ and what did Adam do? He wondered whether he should eat the fruit when he was told not to. He was vacillating, pulling forward, pulling back, not knowing what to do. Rodin was taking an event as powerful and profound as Adam’s fall from grace and putting that meaning into the figure itself. If Bartholdi portrayed Adam, what would he make? A guy with an apple and a bite out of it?”
The “Three Shades,” like most of the works in the gallery, was originally designed for the “Gates of Hell” — an 18-foot portal that would have opened up to the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. The architect for the new museum, Edmund Turquet, gave the prestigious commission to Rodin after his life-size plaster model of a nude male caused uproar because of its convincing detail.
The theme of the door was undoubtedly left up to the artist. “Rodin could have selected the work of any French author or even Shakespeare, who was popular at the time,” said Zakian. “Instead he chose as his inspiration ‘The Divine Comedy,’ by the Italian Renaissance poet Dante Alighieri.”
In the story, readers are led along the route the soul would take towards salvation through the Inferno (hell), Purgatory and finally to Paradise (heaven). Of the three stages, Rodin chose to base his work on the darkest, Dante’s “Inferno.”
The tormented figures that would eventually grace the faade of the gate were produced individually in the artist’s studio and later bolted to the portal from behind. “The Three Shades” were placed at the top of the portal; below that, Rodin planned to place a model of Dante himself sitting in a familiar pose deeply contemplating the woes of the world around him.
Known today as “The Thinker,” Rodin’s image of the poet as strong and muscular broke with stereotypes from classical antiquity that reserved brawny renderings for athletes, and soft, gentle features for intellectuals.
“It’s kind of like fusing the nerd and the jock into one person,” said Zakian. “He looks as if he’s a spring just coiled ready to explode. But the energy that this spring holds is his mind, his mental energy.”
To visually enhance the tension, Rodin posed “The Thinker” unnaturally, with his right elbow on the left knee. All his muscles bulge at once, a physical impossibility, Zakian remarked.
“Rodin felt that bodies were more than just a physical form. We are a body but we’re also a soul. By exaggerating the muscles in such a way, Rodin tried to create a sense of that inner life.”
That was his genius.
For 20 years the artist created and reworked his infernal characters for his monumental portal. Most of the figures served as prototypes for his most celebrated sculptures, including “The Thinker,” “The Three Shades” and even his famous “Kiss.”
Yet, in an ironic twist in the story of Rodin’s life, the museum was never built and his portal never cast in his lifetime. As with most revered talents, moreover, it took the public 40 to 50 years to catch up to his vision.