Semester 2, Lecture 4

19th Century Sculpture

French sculpture in the 19th C was very closely aligned to the grand tradition of sculpture that flowed from Michelangelo on. This kind of work tended to be monumental or architectural. Neo-classicism had reinforced that idea of Roman and Greek sculpture as the highest attainment of sculptural form. It dealt largely with the heroic human figure using solid and durable materials like marble and bronze.

The technical limitations and the expense of producing sculpture meant that the expansive gestures that we saw develop in French Romantic painting were much slower to emerge in sculptural forms.

Portrait of Francois Rude from 1842, by his wife, Sophie Fremiet who was a pupil of Jacques Louis David. Rude initially worked in the neo-classical style, producing idealized figures that referenced ancient Roman myths, like this one of Mercury, the Roman god with the winged sandals. Politically, Rude was a supporter of Napoleon Bonaparte, and was forced to leave the country when Napoleon was finally defeated in 1815. Like the painter David, another ardent Bonapartist, he lived for some years in Belgium, returning to his native country in 1827.

After he returned to France, he became increasingly Republican in his views.  His work found favour with the public, and led to his receiving a commission to create a sculpture for the front of Arc de Triomphe. This fifty metre high structure had been built under Napoleon’s orders to celebrate France’s military achievement. It was unfinished at the time of his defeat in 1815, and was left untouched until the 1830’s when the constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe decided to use the completion of the structure as an ideal opportunity to promote national reconciliation, aiming to offer something that would please every segment of the French political spectrum.

Rude rejected the classical repose of late 18th- and early 19th-century French sculpture in favour of a dynamic, emotional a bas-relief which owes a lot to the Romanticism of Gericault and Delacroix. Departure of the Volunteers of 1792  is intense, rousing, full of drama and movement. The subject commemorates the Battle of Valmy when the French defended the Republic against an attack from the Austro-Prussian army.  The surge of the volunteers, inspired by the great sweeping movement of the Genius of Liberty above them.

Like Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, Rude’s sculpture effectively captured the energy of the republic in its early days, more so perhaps than anything to be found in the art of the 1792 generation. Rude has not entirely rejected neoclassicism, the treatment of the figures, some nude, some dressed in classic armour, draws heavily from antiquity, while the allegorical figure of Liberty recalls the Winged Victory of Samothrace in the Louvre. In fact, 19th C Sculpture had trouble in shaking off the classical legacy; but with the work Rodin in the last quarter of the century, that classical tradition really comes to an end.

Rodin’s first work to be accepted to the Paris Salon was this work, The man with the broken nose a marbel bust. At that time he was working on a sculpture of a life size nude warrior called Le Vaincu or the Defeated One, a memorial to the catastrophic year of 1871. Before he sent it to the salon he removed the spear and called it The age of Bronze. This work formally brought Rodin into the public view, although the anatomical realism which closely echoed the specific model who posed for the sculpture was considered an objectionable feature by many.  Some claimed that it had been cast from real life which at that time would have been seen as cheating, although the practice of making plaster casts of parts of the human body and keeping them around as guides is well documented at this time.  Rodin vehemently denied the accusation, providing photographs of his model and a public letter signed by many of the most respected sculptors of the day. The controversy did not damage Rodins reputation but firmly established him in the public’s mind as an artist of importance. 

In 1884 learned that the city government of Calais wanted to commission a monument to Eustache de St Pierre who, in 1347, had delivered himself along with five other prominent citizens as hostages to King Edward III to persuade the English to lift the siege of Calais. According to the chronicler of the event, Edward’s conditions were harsh indeed .  The hostages had to be bare foot and in sackcloth, with ropes around their necks, bearing the keys to the city fortress and the king was free to do with them as  he pleased. The memory of these civic hereos had been rekindled by the recent war between France and Prussia, which had resulted in the lost of many cities in eastern France.  What attracted Rodin to this commission was the unusual task of a monument honouring a group rather than an individual. 

Rodin’s Maquette, which won the competition shows the hostages moving forward defiantly (only one of them turns aside and clutches his head in terror) on top of a tall base suggesting a triumphal arch.  After he had been granted the commission, the  design however struck him as being too conventionally heroic, and psychologically implausible.  He abandoned it along with the tall base and concentrated on the character of each member of the group, making numerous studies of every figure, every face.

This early version is closer to the original model, but In the final form of the monument the six Bugher de Calais no longer present themselves as group they seem in fact hardly aware of each other’s presence.  What unites them is only their common condition and the low rectangle of ground on which they stand.  The beholder confronting them almost at his own level is urged to focus on the self-absorbed quality of the figures- unheroic, complex human beings like ourselves.

The city fathers of Calais who had been expecting a patriotic public monument, thought the version Rodin presented to them was a failure.  Rather than commemorating a specific historic event, this is a monument to human crisis, showing six varieties of emotionally complex response, which seemed at the time more appropriate for a private rather than a public monument. The idea that sculpture might be a vehicle to express states of mind was a very modern one. After years of argument and struggle the official unveiling took place in 1895.

Rodin made a number of casts of this work, which are now located in different places around the world.

In 1880, before this controversy with the Burghers of Calais, Rodin received a commission from the French state for a pair of bronze gates for a new museum of decorative arts in Paris which had not yet been built. As it turned out it never was built in the end.

Rodin chose Dante’s inferno as his theme and visualised The Gates along the lines of Ghibertis gates of Paradise which he had seen on an Italian trip.  Early on he considered dividing the doors into framed rectangles, but abandoned this in favour of two huge cavernous panels with an uneven background from which a multitude of figures would emerge. He even animated the architectural framework of the door with sculptures of various scales and degree of relief.

For Rodin this was a tremendous seedbed of invention. At 24 feet tall, the commission made it possible for him to explore the expressive potential of the human body as no other artist had dared to before him.  Over the course of the next 20 years Rodin extracted and enlarged many of the forms which had their geneses in the Gates

The thinker was originally conceived as a generalised figure of Dante the poet, who is positioned in the centre, imagining the scene that emerges all around him. This figure was produced in a number of larger versions by Rodin.

This embracing couple are based on Dantes Paolo and Francesca, an ill-fated pair of lovers who have an illicit desire for one another and are therefore tortured in hell. Rodin reconsidered this as a passionate embrace in this world, and reproduced the work many times in various materials and sizes.

Like the Burghers of Calais, the Gates of Hell display a bravado, but also an anxiety and distress that was part of the atmosphere of the modern period in the years between the Franco-Prussian war and the First World War.

Not until 1900 was a plaster cast of The Gates of Hell was first exhibited to the public. It was not a hit, and Rodin seemed to have abandoned any idea of finishing his work. After his the first curator of the Musée Rodin had a complete model of the Gates assembled from the original molds, with the first bronze cast paid for by public subscription carried out in 1926-28. Today there are seven casts of the Gates of Hell throughout the world, made between 1926 and 1997.

In his studio Rodin experimented with a process of assembling together plaster casts from various disparate works in progress. This method of assemblage had not been considered a valid form of sculpture before this, but found its way into early Modernist sculpture as a very important sculptural form.

Portrait of Camille Claudel, who was a pupil of Rodin’s.

The Ecole des Beaux Arts would not take women students, so a group of women got together in a studio in Paris and received instruction there from various tutors. In 1883, when Claudel was 19, Rodin became the tutor for the studio. He recognized her visionary talent very early on. They became lovers and it is now widely believed that Rodin’s vision was significantly influenced by Claudel’s, although for many years it was presented as being the other way around. From 1884 Claudel worked in Rodin’s studio. It is believed that she assisted on many of his most famous works including the Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais, but she also produced and exhibited works of her own.

Claudel was noted for her sensuous nudes, which were considered inappropriate and improper for a woman to express through any art form, especially sculpture, although similar erotic and sensuous forms in Rodin’s work were hugely popular. She came from a wealthy Catholic family in the north of France; her mother was totally opposed to her becoming a sculptor, and when word got out of her affair with Rodin her family was scandalized. Claudel and Rodin had a relationship for 10 years, but when Claudel became pregnant Rodin insisted that she have an abortion. She brought the relationship with him to an end following that in 1894, although they remained in contact for a number of years after.

In 1895, Claudel received a commission for this work, Clotho, to commemorate the painter Puvis de Chavannes, although as a woman she was not allowed to attend the unveiling banquet.

In 1897 La Vague and a number of other works are presented in a Paris gallery. Claudel continues to be referred to as Rodin’s protégée or pupil and she becomes exceedingly frustrated by this. She begins to cut herself off from all those associated with Rodin, which leads to her professional isolation.

In 1898 she finished this commissioned work, which hints at the love triangle between herself, Rodin and his wife Rose Beuret. By 1900 Rodin was a world-famous artist, while Claudel continued to work but struggled to get paid quite often. From around 1905 onwards she became very depressed and exhibited signs of paranoia. She accused Rodin of stealing her ideas, and she destroyed many of her own works. Her father supported her to some extent, but in 1913, a few days after his death her family had her committed to an asylum against her will. Indignant articles were published in the press at the time accusing her family of locking up a genius. She spent the last 30 years of her life being moved between asylums, often in very poor conditions, and never made another piece of work. Although Claudel definitely was suffering from mental illness, many of the doctors who treated her over the years denied that she was insane, and attempted to persuade her family to allow her to be released. They repeatedly refused, and never visited her, apart from a few visits by her brother in the course of the 30 years. This was a relatively common practice used against women who didn’t conform, particularly those who conceived outside of marriage or were considered to be eccentric in any way. In 1929, her former studio mate Jessie Lipscombe visited her in the asylum and insisted that it was not true that Claudel was insane.

Following her death in 1943 her family refused to claim the body and she was buried in a collective grave at the asylum.  

Degas' sculpture stands outside the mainstream of nineteenth-century French sculpture. He was never interested in creating public monuments, and, with one exception, neither did he display his sculpture publicly. The exception wasThe Little Dancer. It was shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition held in Paris in 1881, but doesn’t really correspond to any idea of impressionism. The figure astonished Degas' contemporaries, above all for its realism which was judged brutish by some, but also for the very unusual use of materials. The figure was modeled in wax, wearing a real bodice, stockings, shoes, tulle skirt, and horsehair wig with a satin ribbon. The work had a mixed reception – one critic did speak about it as pointing to a new future for sculpture, but it was never exhibited again in Degas’ lifetime, It has since been cast in bronze and a number of copies exist in different musuems around the world.

The rest of his sculpture remained a private medium, akin to sketches or drawings. Degas limited himself to a small range of subjects, exploring the dynamics of movement or of muscular tensions within the body. On his death 150 of these sculptures were found in his studio, mostly of ballet dancers, women washing and drying themselves and horses. Most of the works were in wax, clay, and plasticine. Nearly all had reached various stages of deterioration.

They were later restored and many of them were subsequently cast in bronze. Like Rodin’s experimental assemblage pieces, these studies of Degas had an effect on the development of Modernist sculpture.

Regarding Degas’ drawings of women it has been noted by some recent critics that they have an extraordinary self-sufficiency, separateness, and sensuous privacy which is largely lacking in the depictions of women in European painting up to this point. In many ways the viewer (always assumed at this stage, and for this kind of work, to be male) is excluded.

The brothel monotypes constitute a series of repetitive images in which the variety of expressive gesture is minimized, individual physiognomic difference is reduced, and complexities of composition, such as costume and decor, are greatly simplified. These images go a long way towards negating traditional aesthetic norms of legibility and corporeality. They present seemingly crude, scribbled, smudged, murky forms in what are frequently almost illegible juxtaposed masses of light and shadow, quite baffling at first sight, almost cartoonish or caricatural in the clumsy quality of the figural delineation, strangely unfinished, abbreviated, and apparently hasty in execution. One has the impression of a rapid sketch made sur place , although these monotypes are actually remembered images composed après coup