Musée Rodin, until 18 march
2007.
I drawn all my life, I began my life while drawing. I never
ceased
drawing. Any young person, also far it I remember me drew.” Soft
confession, like the been obstinated sigh, of a colossus of the
sculpture whose Museum which carries its name has more than 7 000
drawings (out of the 9 000 indexed). This invaluable funds contains
drawings of female subjects selected by Domenica Viéville,
director of the Rodin Museum, Christina Bulet-Uribe and by Helene
Pinet, for an exhibition entitled Rodin : Figures of Eros. We
discover
there five sculptures but especially 140 drawings and erotic
watercolours carried out between 1890 and 1917, of which much seldom
proposed with admiration public. Eroticism. That would apply rather
well to certain obscenities of Rodin, which one
sees nothing any more but the genius. There is certainly in these works
of the impudor, of indecency, never sordid sometimes even merry but
also frank crudeness been useful however by an incomparable graphic
virtuosity. And chromatics: these yellows, color of the desire, or
these incredible pinks for example, which return the flesh, the
half-opened sexes of an almost real evocative power which can cause a
disorder that the either plane representation but in three dimensions
of the sculpture, supposedly more explicit, could not reach.
There are, moreover, these abundant chevelures, these variations on the
gestures of the pleasure, saphic complicities, this mixture of
anatomical precision and ellipses, this great art of contours and the
points of meetings between what of impavides clinicians to the morose
lexicon “erotogenic zones could” even “call characters secondary
sexual”. Add to that the reputation and the temperament of the artist
(“This flesh who returns to me so attentive”), of the
hot atmosphere of its workshop, these hundreds of
young models (which was sometimes its mistresses), selected dancers
professional in the Opéra Comique like Alda Moreno or of pretty
young ladies walking in a market specialized Pigalle place, and one has
very to attract the man and nevertheless man who does
not have anything against collateral emotions with contemplation of
these drawings whose Rilke said that they were “the extreme point” of
his work. It will be disappointed. These watercolours do not have
anything of émoustillant nor of erotic, they gave place besides
to no puritan uproar during their first public exhibition, in 1900,
with
the House of Alma.
The interest is elsewhere and it is purely artistic. The exhibition is
the occasion, almost didactic to see what to draw wants to say. Rodin
uses in these series all the techniques of the drawing (and sometimes
their coexistence in only one work) with an impressive effectiveness:
initially, an extraordinary safety and flexibility of the feature and
curve. To what are added an ease in the gouache who makes think of Egon
Schiele at whom one can see some resemblances to Rodin of these
watercolours: the fragile Viennese and Herculéen vis-a-vis the
same gaping. And which returned movement, trembled, the vaporous one
and clearness. The exhibition is also a masterly lesson of art. And
attractive when it is known that the artist drew his models moving
without never looking at the sheet: “My hands feel already what my eyes
see.”
There is like a wonder in this seizure fugitive, imperceptible and
final, something which perhaps raises of “exploding fixes” André
Breton dreamed.
One is in full obviousness, that of art like gesture striking down and
revealing, that, of course, of the representation of the body and
singularly of nudity, that quite simply of the beauty which hides
sometimes in blacknesses and the enigmas without name that Dante and
Baudelaire explored whose Rodin illustrated the Hell and the Flowers of
the evil.
