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Notes: Property from a Private American Collection
This work will be included in the forthcoming Auguste Rodin catalogue critique de l'oeuvre sculpté currently being prepared by the Comité Rodin at Galerie Brame et Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2002V202B.
Conceived initially as part of an Adam and Eve group to flank the Gates of Hell, Rodin's sculpture of Eve is one of the great turning points in modern sculpture. Its rough and freely worked surface, more like that of a wax or plaster model than the traditional smooth surface typical of most earlier bronzes, was a major departure for Rodin. It led the way to the more expressive conception of surface and material that were characteristic of his later sculpture; this in turn would have a significant impact on early twentieth-century sculpture.
The statue exemplifies Rodin's mastery as a narrative artist. Eve, turning in upon herself as if to protect a newly vulnerable body, is a psychological profile of sin and the fall from grace. The intensely wrought emotion of Eve is expressed in her every muscle and sinew: in the tight fold of her arms shielding her naked flesh, in the tension of her neck, and in the locking together of her thighs. A contradictory image of voluptuousness and shame, Eve appears frozen in an attitude of corporeal renunciation and profound remorse. The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote:
''Eve . . . stands with head sunk deeply into the shadow of the arms that draw together over the breast like those of a freezing woman. The back is rounded, the nape of the neck almost horizontal. She bends forward as though listening over her own being in which a new future begins to stir. And it is as though the gravity of this future weighed upon the senses of the woman and drew her down from the freedom of life into the deep humble service of motherhood" (in Rodin, trans. J. Lemont and H. Transil, London, 1946).
Rilke's description is particularly noteworthy since he served as Rodin's secretary (1905-1906) and visited Pellerin's home in Neuilly to study his collection.
The theme of Eve after the Fall had great appeal in the 19th century. A staple of academic and religious painting, the subject was given new life by Gauguin and the Symbolists in the late 1880s and 1890s. Indeed, Rodin's ingenious interpretation of the figure, with its sense of extreme withdrawal and self-abnegation, looks forward to later developments in French art of the twentieth century, from the brooding beggars of Picasso's Blue Period to the sculpture of Henri Matisse (fig. 1) and Constantin Brancusi (fig. 2), two sculptors who appear to have reinterpreted the striking gesture of Eve's folded arms in their early works. One possible precedent for the figural disposition of Eve is Houdon's La Frileuse (L'Hiver) of 1783 (fig. 3). The gesture of Eve's shame actually has a long visual history that begins with the Venus Pudica type in classical art, continues with Masaccio's Expulsion of Adam and Eve in the Brancacci Chapel, and extends to a sculpture by a contemporary of Rodin, Paul Dubois, who exhibited his Newborn Eve in 1873 (Musée du Petit-Palais, Paris).
Rodin's organic conception of form as the surface articulation of an inner expressive force is plainly visible in Eve. "Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces more or less flat," Rodin explained, "I represented them as projectures [projections] of interior volumes. I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the limbs the efflorescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep beneath the skin. And so the truth of my figures, instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom forth from within to the outside, like life itself . . ." (quoted in L. Nochlin, ed., Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1874-1904. Sources and Documents, Englewood Cliffs, 1966, pp. 72-73). Rodin's naturalism far extends beyond the question of anatomical accuracy to the expression of a life force that is visible in the often summary, pitted, or exaggerated surfaces of his sculptures, especially those works cast in bronze. Speaking of his great Balzac, Rodin explained: "I tried . . . to render in sculpture what was not photographic . . . My principle is to imitate not only form but life. I search in nature for this life and I amplify it by exaggerating the holes and lumps in order to gain more light, after which I search for a synthesis of the whole" (quoted in R. Butler, ed., Rodin in Perspective, Englewood Cliffs, 1980, p. 94). The great German art historian Julius Meier-Graefe concurred: "[Rodin's] art, like every
other--nay, more than any other--impresses by means of exaggeration, and the older he grows the more clearly he recognises this truth" (quoted in ibid., p. 133).
So developed was Rodin's attention to the surface of his sculptures that he conceived sculptural form in relation to the play of light and shadow, willfully abandoning the bel idéal of academic tradition in favor of a new freedom of expressive distortion. As Rilke astutely observed:
''When Rodin concentrates the surfaces of his works into culminating points, when he uplifts to greater height the exalted or gives more depth to a cavity, he creates an effect like that which atmosphere produces on monuments that have been exposed to it for centuries. The atmosphere has traced deeper lines upon these monuments, has shadowed them with veils of dust, has seasoned them with rain and frost, with sun and storm, and has thus endowed them with endurance so that they may remain imperishable through many slowly passing dusks and dawns" (op. cit.).
Photography, in fact, aided Rodin in realizing his goals. Although the great sculptor is not known to have taken pictures himself, he employed numerous photographers who documented his works at varying stages of execution and sold prints of completed works from which Rodin derived royalties. More importantly, Rodin used photographs to bring out formal relationships he sought in a given sculpture, as two gelatin silver prints by Druet of Eve in Rodin's studio attest. In one (fig. 4), the dramatic lighting silhouettes the figure and emphasizes the continuous contour of her back, head, and right arm and leg. Indeed, this articulation of the figure in relation to a linear arabesque would have a profound influence on Henri Matisse's development of sculptural form in the early years of the twentieth century. In the second photograph by Druet, the swollen mass of Eve's back is emphasized, corresponding to Rilke's description of the ways in which Rodin conceived his sculpture in relation to "culminating points" of mass and cavities. In other cases, photographs served Rodin as aide-mémoires, as the basis for transfer drawings, as interpretative studies for the correction and alteration of individual works (in which Rodin might pen the shadows of a figure upon the surface of a photograph), and as records of the various dispositions and attitudes of a single sculpture or of a large sculptural ensemble like the Gates of Hell.
Rodin's interpretation of Eve was, in fact, intimately connected with his work on the Gates. In 1880 Rodin received the prestigious commission to execute the entrance portal for a proposed Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Rodin submitted an independent figure of Adam, which he began that same year but had conceived prior to receiving the commission for the Gates, to the Salon of 1881, an expressive Michelangelesque sculpture which he exhibited under the title The Creation. Inspired by Michelangelo's Adam from The Creation of Man fresco in the Sistine Chapel, Rodin also conceived a pendant figure, Eve, which he produced as a plaster. At an early stage in his work on the Gates, Rodin considered installing the figures of Adam and Eve on either side of the Gates, like door jambs flanking the portal of a Gothic cathedral. Rodin went so far as to petition to remove the figure of Adam from the Salon of 1881 and to have it returned to his studio on the rue de l'Université so he could continue work on his revised conception of the Gates. At the same time, he sought to have the figures of Adam and Eve officially commissioned for the sculptural ensemble, thereby expanding his symbolic cosmology in the Gates to include scenes from Dante's Inferno and the Fall of Man. Although Rodin was unsuccessful in securing the additional commission, he repeated the
figure of Adam three times for The Three Shades who preside over the Gates, while the life-sized figure of Eve, which exists in numerous marble versions, was not publicly exhibited as a bronze until the Salon of 1899, at which time Rodin took the extraordinary measure of having its base buried in the sand.
It is not entirely clear if Rodin produced the life-sized plaster for Eve in 1880-1881, or if he abandoned and later returned to the sculpture. According to Ruth Butler (op. cit.) the model for Eve was an Italian girl named Adèle Abruzzezzi, who also posed for Torso of Adèle, Fallen Caryatid Carrying Her Stone, and Crouching Woman. Rodin's reaction to his model in the process of
sculpting Eve is illuminating: "Without knowing why," Rodin writes, "I saw my model changing. I modified my contours, naively following the successive transformations of ever-amplifying forms. One day, I learned that she was pregnant; then I understood . . . It certainly hadn't occurred to me to take a pregnant woman as my model for Eve; an accident--happy for me--gave her to me, and it aided the character of the figure singularly. But soon, becoming more sensitive, my model found the studio too cold; she came less frequently, then not at all" (quoted in P. Fusco and H.W. Janson, The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North American Collections, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1980, p. 336). On the basis of this commentary, Butler raises the possibility that Rodin suspended work on the sculpture in 1880-1881, bolstering her argument with the observation that the agitated surface articulation of the figure is consistent with Rodin's style in the 1890's.
(fig. 1) Henri Matisse, Madeline I, 1901. BARCODE 20625306
(fig. 2) Constantin Brancusi, The Prayer, 1907. BARCODE 20625290
(fig. 3) Jean-Antoine Houdon, La Frileuse (L'Hiver), 1787. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. BARCODE 20625283
