Walking into Modernity

At the turn of the twentieth century, following Rodin’s work on The Burghers of Calais and Monument to Honoré de Balzac, Rodin would abandon his more academically-themed works and turn to partial figures, focusing on the impressions given by their unique postures. Stripped down to the bare essentials, which highlighted their dynamic nature, these figures would mark Rodin’s wholehearted foray into the depiction of the Impressionist style. They were, in effect, the sculptural version of Impressionist artists’ quick, and decidedly rough paintings - sketches, as these paintings were once derisively called. As the two Goncourt brothers, noted French art critics and historians, then stated about Rodin during this period:

“In the midst of today’s infatuation with Impressionism, where every painting remains in a sketchy state, Rodin is the first artist to establish his name and fame in sculpture through sketches.” (qtd. Masson, 7)

The best example of Rodin’s ‘sketchy,’ impressionist sculpture also happens to be his most well known ‘incomplete’ figure. Named The Walking Man (left), this work personifies what the latter part of Rodin’s career as a sculptor was all about: the dynamic pose of a partial figure. Deriving much from Rodin’s earlier work St. John the Baptist Preaching, including the powerful stance, Rodin had stripped all academic associations from his figure, and instead focused on what he considered essential: the dynamic pose.

The incompleteness of this figure, this ‘sketchiness’ is what gives The Walking Man such an incredibly forceful power. Distilling the essence of what made St. John the Baptist Preaching so dynamic, and using that essence as the whole focus of his work, Rodin has imbued the sculpture with a pose that solely concentrates on the impression of a singular forward action and movement. Noted art historian Leo Steinberg would say this about The Walking Man’s pose:

“The stance is profoundly unclassical, especially in the digging-in conveyed by the pigeon-toed stride and the rotation of the upper torso. Unlike the balanced, self-possessed classical posture with both feet turned out, Rodin uses the kind of step that brings all power to bear on the moment’s work.” (qtd. Elsen 553)

Rodin had not only brought all the power of his figure ‘to bear on the moment’s work,’ as Steinberg had said, but in a way, utilized all of his own power as a sculptor to fashion perhaps one of the most pure and dynamic sculptural poses in modern era. Wholly without a subject and sculpted with a ‘profoundly unclassical’ pose, The Walking Man would highlight Rodin’s changed attitudes towards his sculpture and would mark a conscious break from his past academic style. What this ‘conscious break’ from academic standards would do was usher in the age of modern sculpture. The impact and influence of Rodin’s fragmented The Walking Man would be felt in such future works as Raymond Duchamp-Villon’s Torso of a Young Man (left) and Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (right). After Rodin, the world of sculpture would no longer be the same, with Boccioni later affirming the work of Rodin and boldly declaring:

“We proclaim that the whole visible world must fall in on us, merging with us and creating a harmony measurable only by the creative imagination; that a leg, an arm, or an object, having no importance except as elements of plastic rhythm, can be abolished, not in order to imitate a Greek or Roman fragment, but to conform to the harmony the artist wishes to create.” (qtd. Elsen, 552)

What Rodin had done in fragmenting his sculpture and liberating it from the yoke of an academic theme was to pave the way for the emergence of a new era of sculptures; without a true subject, these works instead focused on the ‘harmony’ and ‘plastic rhythm’ of their elements. His focus on dynamic poses, which grew with his academic work until it became the ultimate, dominant focus of his later works, had predicated this emergence. We can see then, that the ‘sketchy’ quality of his academic works, such as the The Burghers of Calais and Monument to Honoré de Balzac, and the subsequent fragmentary style which focused all attention on his figures’ poses, proves that at the end of his career, Rodin had, in all effects and purposes, become an Impressionist sculptor. As the Impressionists painters had brought about a new era of painting, so too would Rodin do the same for sculpture: His redefinition of what was considered art would propel sculpture into the modern age.