There is a beautiful anecdote about an event which allegedly took place in Paris in 1911 - a meeting between two great artists, Auguste Rodin and Antonio Sciortino. Rodin, the French master sculptor of the modern period, acquired a sculptural portrait of concert pianist Leo Tectonius from the Maltese Sciortino. Rodin's influence is explicitly witnessed in Sciortino's early works. The masterpiece The Thinker was appropriated by the Sciortino and transformed into Il Lavoratore (The Worker); the contorted, damned figures from Rodin's The Gates of Hell are seen in Sciortino's Remorse and L'Irredentismo (Irredentism). Other quotations from Rodin are also manifested in the Maltese sculptor's work.
The link between Maltese twentieth-century art and Rodin was the subject of the international conference 'Peripheral Alternatives to Rodin in Modern European Sculpture' held last December, an event which has already been discussed at length. This discussion has continued to evolve, and one of the keynote speakers of the conference, Dr. Sophie Biass-Fabiani, curator of prints, drawings, paintings and contemporary art at the Musée Rodin in Paris, was once again invited by the Department of History of Art to discuss Rodin's works with students.
Dr. Biass-Fabiani has worked in several art institutions in France and beyond and has published extensively on Rodin, contributing to the wealth of scholarship available on the artist. Her conference paper tackled Rodin's legacy in contemporary art, particularly in European sculpture from the 1960s and 70s, which is the subject of the major exhibition being held in 2017 to mark the centenary of Rodin's death. Tuesday's lecture was aimed at introducing the complexity of Rodin's artworks to first year BA students, but, more importantly, Dr. Biass-Fabiani also informed the class of current research being undertaken at the Musée Rodin for the students to be aware of how the artist's work is being studied in the 21st century.
She began by saying that Rodin may either be considered as the last classical sculptor or as the first modern sculptor, depending on one's research approach. This shows that Rodin embodied the temporal ambiguity so characteristic of modernity, meaning that he stood on the threshold between the past and the present and such change is palpable in his artistic practice, as is made clear by his eclectic process of working.
For example, Dr. Biass-Fabiani showed several images of Rodin's studies for the Balzac monument, which was a highly contentious commission disliked by his regular patrons. The sculptor's work centres on the human body. He was obsessed with the human form and its dynamic possibilities. However, the Balzac monument is absent of such form, with only the idea of a body made visible beneath the weighty dressing gown of the author. The differences between each of the studies and the final work are huge, yet it is possible to establish conceptual links between all the pieces. Each work, from the beginning to the end result, oscillate between bodily sizes and shapes, showing the struggle of the artist to represent the greatest French writer of the 19th century without insipidly replicating his short, portly appearance.
Another intriguing Rodinesque masterpiece which was discussed was The Gates of Hell, his Dantesque tour de force which was never realised. Dr. Biass-Fabiani showed the intricate workings of the sculptor in the process of creating these doors. Each of the individual figures, as well as minor, dismembered details exist as plaster studies. These Rodin literally copied and pasted onto the entire work - changing, removing, re-working incessantly. The last version of the Gates of Hell is contrastingly abstract, with the figures he worked on so assiduously reduced to frozen yet fluid movements in plaster. This coming October the Musée Rodin will be devoting an entire exhibition to this work entitled 'Hell According to Rodin' in which around 200 works will be displayed.
Rodin is of course known for his larger monumental works, yet his level of production was incredible. He possessed an admirable work ethic and believed that an artist should work relentlessly. There are elements of Rodin's oeuvre which would surprise many, especially those familiar with his masterpieces. For example, he was one of the first, if not the first, sculptors to experiment with the assemblage method. The same goes for his appropriation of the found object as sculptural form, the gesture with which his French descendant Marcel Duchamp revolutionised the art world. There are even postmodern tendencies in Rodin's fragmented, somewhat incongruous, juxtapositions of antiquities and modern art. He possessed an immense collection of antiquities and was obsessed with re-using classical forms and even Gothic elements to understand human anatomy.
Besides his industrious investment into his art, Dr. Biass-Fabiani's research has shown that Rodin was a very successful PR manager, to use a contemporary term. He was excellent at self-promotion and managed to sell himself as well as his art, establishing a sort of celebrity cult around his image.
I have here given a short resume of the points debated in the lecture and which continued throughout the day. It is always intriguing to discuss an artist with someone who has built up such an enviable, intimate, even quotidian, relationship with the life and work of a master. For Maltese students to be exposed to the knowledge of a scholar of a major artist is an important step for research on Maltese artists. It exposes us to new perspectives, new research methods, new ideas and to a project which is tightly bound up with the everyday life of a highly dedicated individual.