The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Auguste Rodin · Monument à Balzac · a single standing figure, the writer wrapped in a dressing gown, in the round, at the scale of a public monument · commissioned in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres · finished in 1898 and shown in plaster at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in May of that year, then refused by the society that commissioned it · scored as the figure as Rodin finished it in 1898, cast in bronze only after his death, the first bronze set up in Paris at the crossing of the boulevard Raspail and the boulevard du Montparnasse in 1939; the seven years of studies, the later casts as objects and the photographs of the plaster are context, the casts counting for survival and presence only
Mode
The commemorative portrait statue emptied of likeness, attribute and story: a single expressive mass, its surface left summary, its meaning carried by silhouette, inclination and the modelled head
Mythos
The creator as titan, the head out of the mass as a god’s out of rock; the standing stone, the first marker of the honoured dead, given the shape of a modern writer
Phase
Commissioned 1891; seven years of studies; the plaster shown and refused in 1898 and kept at Meudon; cast in bronze after Rodin’s death in 1917, the first bronze set up in Paris in 1939
Presentation
A single figure in the round, made to loom on a boulevard and to be seen from a distance and from every side; in Paris since 1939 and in later casts in several museums
Register
Grandeur, slightly dreadful: night, will and isolation, with no tenderness
Scale
One man, one cloth, one head
Governing Proposition
A man stands wrapped in a long dressing gown whose empty sleeves hang at his sides; his arms are inside it, held to the body under the cloth, and no hand is seen. The head is thrown back and turned, the hair a mane, the eyes cut so deep that the gaze is shadow, and the whole figure leans backward as one mass. There is no pen, no book, no desk and no allegory on the pedestal. The wager of the work is that a writer is not his likeness, his attributes or his story but a force of work and vision, and that a monument can honour him by presence rather than by description, even if the city it is made for does not recognise him.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
In 1891 the Société des Gens de Lettres, the society of French writers, with Zola as its president, gave Auguste Rodin the commission for a monument to Balzac. It came to him after the death of Henri Chapu, who had held the commission first. What the society expected was the monument of its century: a likeness of the novelist, recognisable to a passer by, in his costume and with the instruments of his calling, raised on a pedestal that told his story to the boulevard.
Rodin spent seven years on it. He made heads, nude studies of the whole figure, clothed and robed studies, and he dipped a real dressing gown in plaster to see how the cloth would fall. The nude studies give a squat, powerful man in a wrestler’s stance, comic and forceful, and they show what the gown would later cover. The studies are the documented search by which the alternatives were removed, and they are context: the work is what the search arrived at.
The work scored here is the figure as Rodin finished it in 1898, shown in plaster at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in May of that year: a standing Balzac wrapped in a dressing gown whose empty sleeves hang at the sides, the head thrown back and turned, the whole leaning backward as one mass. It was cast in bronze only after Rodin’s death on 17 November 1917. The later casts are the same form and count for survival and presence; the photographs of the plaster and the monument that replaced it are context.
Movement II
There is a head and a robe, and the robe is the body. The gown Balzac wore to write through the night closes over the man from the shoulders to the ground. His arms are inside it, held to the body under the cloth, and the sleeves hang empty at his sides: the hands that wrote are hidden from the city. There is no pen, no book, no desk and no allegory. The person is shown as the habit of labour, and the work’s statement is that a writer is not his likeness or his attributes but a force of work and vision.
Out of this mass comes the head, the most worked and particular part of the figure. It is thrown back and turned, the hair a mane, built in deep hollows and ridges that hold shadow and read at a distance, and the eye sockets are cut so deep that the gaze is made of darkness. The head is the place where the world was seen. Take away the deep cutting of the eyes and mouth and the head would no longer look out of the mass at anything; take away the empty sleeves and the cloak would lose the sign of the arms inside it.
One law governs the whole: everything rises. The folds of the robe run upward in a few great planes; the mass narrows toward the shoulders and opens into the head; the lean carries the weight back, judged so that the figure stands while seeming to fall away from the viewer. The empty sleeves are the only downward line, and they mark the arms withdrawn into the body, which serves the same law. The law is complete, and it is held over very few things: one figure, one cloth and one head.
Movement III
At a distance, and above all at night, the silhouette reads first as a standing stone or the trunk of a tree, and only then as a man with his head thrown back. The oldest kind of monument, the upright stone set for the honoured dead, is the shape of the figure, so that a modern writer is raised in the form of the first marker. The creator as titan, the head out of the mass like a god’s out of rock, is carried by the modelling and by no allusion to any hero of myth. The particular stays particular all the same: the belly, the monk’s dressing gown, the face of one man.
The form is the knowledge. Only sculpture in the round, seen from a distance and from every side, by day and by night, can show genius as mass, silhouette and inclination; a painting of the same figure would be a portrait in a cloak, and a description would be rhetoric. The cloak turns a body into one volume and leaves the head and the lean to carry everything. The figure must loom, and seen from below it does: from the side the lean becomes a surge, and from the back the cloak is a cliff.
The register is single. The work is grand and slightly dreadful, a mood of night, will and isolation, with no tenderness anywhere in it. At close quarters the surface of the lower robe is summary, and parts of it read as a sack before they read as grandeur; that is the method, and it costs legibility. What the figure discloses is close to the Romantic idea of genius, already articulate in Balzac’s own century, given its best body in sculpture rather than stated anew.
Movement IV
The inheritance was the commemorative portrait statue: a likeness, a costume, the pen and the book, a pedestal with allegory. The figure kept none of it, and carried an expressive distortion into a public commission from a learned society. The society refused the work. The press mocked it, and the commission passed to Alexandre Falguière, whose seated Balzac took its place. Rodin took the plaster back to Meudon. He never saw it in bronze or in the street.
The refusal fell in 1898, the year of Zola’s letter on Dreyfus, and whether the work was refused for its art or for the politics of that year is one of the questions it has kept open. It proved, in any case, the work’s second statement: that a city can be shown a man it does not recognise. The turn had a history. Rodin had been making it for years, in the Walking Man, in the partial figures and in the low base of the Burghers, and Medardo Rosso’s dissolving figures had gone before him on one part of the road.
The plaster stayed at Meudon and was not hidden. Artists came to see it, and in 1908 Steichen photographed it there at night, so that it became an image of modernity before any bronze existed. Those photographs show what return to the object still shows: the figure changes with light, with distance and with the side from which it is seen. The line through the reduced and expressive figure runs from it to Brancusi, who worked briefly in Rodin’s studio, to Lehmbruck, to Matisse’s sculpture and to Giacometti’s tall figures.
Movement V
The first bronze was cast for the Musée Rodin and set up in Paris at the crossing of the boulevard Raspail and the boulevard du Montparnasse, where it was inaugurated in 1939, forty-one years after the plaster was refused and twenty-one years after the sculptor’s death. The plaster survives; the bronzes, cast from the finished plaster under the rights Rodin left to the state, carry the form as he left it, which is the ordinary condition of his bronzes. Further casts stand in several museums. The figure’s presence was delayed and partial for its first forty years and has been public since.
About 128 years after the plaster, the questions it raised are still asked. Is it a portrait, a monument or the first modern sculpture; is it unfinished, or finished in a new sense; what is under the robe, and does what the nude studies show belong to the work or to its making; did it mark the moment at which the monument lost its site and its logic. The return yields most on these questions, and less on the object itself, whose mass and lean are seen again rather than seen anew.
The desk sets it level with The Burghers of Calais at 8.7, the group of six with a city and a history, which holds more of the world and discloses a stated human condition, where this single figure turns further from the tradition; a tenth above The Gates of Hell at 8.6, a compressed figure over a sprawling portal; well above The Thinker at 8.3; level with Munch’s The Scream at 8.7, another scandal of form at the turn of the century; a tenth under Cézanne’s The Large Bathers and Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon at 8.8; level with Rilke’s New Poems, written in Rodin’s orbit, and with the Eiffel Tower, a monument of the same city and decade mocked by its men of letters before it became its emblem, both at 8.7. The writer stands on the boulevard in his working gown, his hands withdrawn, his head thrown back, a stone that turns into a man as one walks round it.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. There is a head and a robe, and the robe is the body. Remove the robe and the work is the nude studies, a squat, powerful, comic man in a wrestler’s stance: that was tried and set aside. Remove the backward lean and the mass stands as a column, a monument of the ordinary kind. Remove the empty sleeves and the cloak loses the sign that the arms are inside it. Remove the deep cutting of the eyes and mouth and the head no longer looks out of the mass at anything. Every part is required, and seven years of studies were spent finding what could go. Held below the top because so extreme a reduction leaves the test little to test: necessity in one mass is easier to keep than in Las Meninas, where many parts each earn their place.
Score: 8.7 / 10
What can be stated: that a writer is not his likeness, his attributes or his story, but a force of work and vision, and that a monument should show that force rather than the man at his desk. The gown Balzac wore to write through the night becomes the body that wrote; the person is shown as the habit of labour, and the head as the place where the world was seen. A second statement: that a public monument can honour by presence rather than by description, and that a city can be shown a man it does not recognise, which the refusal of 1898 proved. These meanings hold. What holds the axis below the gate is that the first is close to the Romantic idea of genius, already articulate in Balzac’s own century, and that much of what the figure gives is a mood of night, will and isolation rather than a condition of human life widely stated.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Elevation is the work’s whole register, grand and slightly dreadful. Its places: the silhouette, which at a distance reads as a standing stone or a tree trunk before it reads as a man; the backward lean, which makes the mass seem to rise against its own weight; the head thrown back and turned, the hair a mane, the eye sockets cut so deep that the gaze is shadow; and the scale of a single dark form made for a public place. Seen from below, as the bronze on the boulevard is seen, the figure looms, and the height recurs as one walks round it: from the side the lean becomes a surge, from the back the cloak is a cliff. What limits the axis: one register only, with no tenderness, and at close quarters parts of the robe read as a sack before they read as grandeur.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Myth is built in the form, not summoned by attribute. The man becomes a standing stone: the oldest kind of monument, the first marker of the honoured dead, is the shape of the figure, so that a modern writer is raised in its form. The creator as titan, the head coming out of the mass as a god’s out of rock, is carried by the modelling rather than by any allusion to Prometheus or Moses. The robe built over a body that the nude studies show gripping itself makes the creative act a bodily, generative one hidden under cloth. The particular stays particular: Balzac’s belly and his monk’s dressing gown. Held below the higher figures because the archetype is single, creator and stone, and does not extend to a world.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The inheritance is the commemorative portrait statue of the nineteenth century: a recognisable likeness, a costume, the attributes of the calling, pen, book and desk, a pedestal with allegory, a figure for the boulevard to read. The departure removes all of it: no likeness in the ordinary sense, no attribute, no story, the body hidden, a man made a mass, an expressive distortion carried into a public commission from a learned society. The cost was paid in full and in public: the society refused the work, the press mocked it, the commission passed to a rival, and Rodin took the plaster back to Meudon and never saw it in bronze or in the street. Held below the top because Rodin had been making the turn for years, in the Walking Man, the partial figures and the low base of the Burghers, and because Medardo Rosso’s dissolving figures went before it on one part of the road.
Score: 9.2 / 10
Substitute any other form and what the work knows is gone. It knows that genius can be shown as mass, silhouette and inclination, and only sculpture in the round, seen from a distance and from every side, by day and by night, can show that. A painting of the same figure would be a portrait in a cloak; a description would be Romantic rhetoric. The cloak is the instrument: it turns a body into a single volume and leaves the head and the lean to carry everything. The knowledge depends too on scale and siting: the figure must loom. A real dressing gown dipped in plaster for the studies, then the robe reworked, shows the form found by the material itself. Held below the top only because the single figure makes the instrument simple: the form is wholly the knowledge, but the knowledge is one thing.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Evidence over promise: about 128 years of return, and the questions have stayed open. Is it a portrait, a monument or the first modern sculpture; is it unfinished, or finished in a new sense; what is under the robe, and does the reading of the nude studies belong to the work or only to its making; was it refused for its art or for the politics of 1898, the year of Zola’s letter on Dreyfus; did it mark the point at which the monument lost its site and its logic. Return to the object yields too: it changes with light, distance and side, as Steichen’s night photographs of the plaster show. Held below the top because the yield on return to the object is mostly of one kind, the mass and its lean seen again.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Shown in 1898, so intrinsic force and achieved reach are scored together, in the field of European sculpture of the 1890s and the decades after. Intrinsic force: a reorganisation of what a public statue could be, from description to presence, from finish to the evident hand, from likeness to expressive mass. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the plaster drew artists to Meudon; Steichen’s photographs of 1908 made it an image of modernity before any bronze existed; the line through the expressive and reduced figure runs to Brancusi, who worked briefly in Rodin’s studio, to Lehmbruck, to Matisse’s sculpture and to Giacometti’s tall figures; and the crisis of the monument, which this work announced, is a theme of the century. Discounted because the reach was partly delayed, with no bronze until 1939, and because some of it belongs to Rodin’s practice as a whole rather than to this figure.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, about 128 years from the plaster. Form: whole. The plaster survives, and the bronzes carry the form as Rodin left it. Presence: withheld from the street for forty-one years and kept at Meudon, but continuously present to artists and through photographs, then public in Paris since 1939 and in several museums; fame is presence and lifts the figure only a little. Fabric: the bronzes are posthumous casts from the finished plaster under the rights Rodin left to the state, the ordinary condition of his bronzes, which takes little from a work modelled for casting; a patinated bronze outdoors weathers and is maintained. The delayed and partial presence of the first forty years and the posthumous fabric hold it at the usual figure rather than the one kept for the widest presence.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Command of modelling at monumental scale, and load-bearing. The head is built in deep hollows and ridges that hold shadow and read at a distance, the eye sockets cut to make a gaze out of darkness. The robe is a few great planes and folds that run upward to the head, so that the eye is carried as the body seems to rise. The lean is judged so that the mass stands while seeming to fall back. The process is itself command: dozens of studies of head and body, a real gown soaked in plaster to find the drape, then a reworking that kept the cloth’s weight and dropped its detail. Charged: at close range the surface of the lower robe is summary, which is the method but costs legibility. Below The Gates of Hell at 9.3, whose modelling is the finer and the more various.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the foot of the robe, where the cloth meets the ground as a rough mass, and the head, the most worked and particular part. One law governs both: everything rises. The folds of the robe run upward; the lean carries the weight back so that the figure seems to lift; the mass narrows toward the shoulders and opens into the head, where the one point of particularity sits. The empty sleeves fall, the only downward line, and they mark the arms withdrawn into the mass, which serves the same law. Nothing contradicts it. Held because narrowness is not coherence: the territory is one figure, one cloth and one head, and a law held over so few elements is held over a small range, however completely.
Score: 8.8 / 10
The orders held are few and integrated in one figure: the individual consciousness, the head as the site of vision; labour, the writer’s night work in its working dress; the body, bulk and appetite and, through the studies, sex; the public order, a learned society, a city and its honouring of the dead; and the natural order, in the standing stone and the tree trunk of the silhouette. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is absent: Balzac’s own subject, the whole society of the Comédie humaine, enters only by inference; there is no family, no history, no state beyond the commission, no sacred order except as the standing stone recalls it. A single figure is a small form on this axis, level with The Thinker at 6.6, and the figure describes the form.
Score: 6.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Swerve at 9.2, then The Living Form at 9.1, then Pressure on Tradition, The Imperishable and The Made at 9.0. The commemorative statue emptied of likeness, attribute and story at the full public cost of refusal; a form that is wholly its knowledge, genius shown as mass, silhouette and inclination; a reorganisation of the public monument that reached artists through the plaster and its photographs before any bronze existed; a form whole in plaster and in bronze; and modelling that makes a head hold shadow at a distance and a robe rise.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 6.6: consciousness, labour, the body, the public order and the natural order held in one mass, and the society of the Comédie humaine, the family, history, the state and the sacred left outside it. Above it, The Unconcealment at 8.3: the writer as force is close to the Romantic idea of genius, given a body more than stated anew. Then The Archetypal Deep at 8.6: one archetype, creator and stone, that does not extend to a world. The three are one fact: a single figure, one man, one cloth and one head.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.7 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.1, The Made at 9.0, The Inner Law at 8.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Swerve at 9.2, Pressure on Tradition at 9.0, The Imperishable at 9.0 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.3 falls short of it. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis it governs falls below The Unconcealment at 8.3, against 7.5. The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 6.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The twelve sum to 103.8, an average of 8.65 that displays 8.7, in Tier IV, held below the summit by the unmet gate and by the aggregate, three tenths short of 9.0.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of the figure, its documented history and its photographs; known well as an image and as a history, its exact dimensions and the list of its casts known less well. No image or written source was consulted. The work scored is the figure as Rodin finished it in 1898 and showed it in plaster at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in May of that year, in the form carried by the bronzes cast after his death from the finished plaster, the first of them cast for the Musée Rodin and inaugurated at the crossing of the boulevard Raspail and the boulevard du Montparnasse in 1939. The seven years of studies (the heads, the nude studies, the clothed and robed studies, the dressing gown dipped in plaster), the refusal of 1898, the later casts as objects, Steichen’s photographs of the plaster at Meudon and Falguière’s replacement monument are context; the casts bear on The Imperishable only. The figure carries no words, and nothing is quoted: a judgment of Rodin’s on the figure that is widely reported, and the insults printed in the press of 1898, are not given, because their words could not be verified. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the figure’s height, the term the commission set for delivery, whether the plaster was shown beside another of Rodin’s works, the year Falguière’s monument was unveiled, where the plaster is now kept, the number and places of the later casts, whether local men sat as models for the face, how the enlargement was made and by whom, a remark on the figure attributed to Brancusi, and a later critical account placing the figure at the start of modernist sculpture.