Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1908 (Heft 22))

Some of these are colored with primitive Egyptian blues and reds and yellows, spread on the
paper in delicate washes and puzzling blotches, as incomprehensibly childlike at times as the scrawl
that envelops the color. A few facetious ones have likened these drawings to Gillett Burgess’s
“goups,” and perhaps the analogy is not so far-fetched, but surely more significant than these
ready wits imagined. It is this unbiased quality, the very essence of good humor which becomes
satire the moment it becomes biased, that gives to these drawings their great and abiding value.
They express the child’s wonder at the great facts of life as seen by a man who has lived and
become acquainted with its spirit. It is this good humor and this wonder that keep them from
being both vulgar and immoral. Nothing that concerns man is alien to him, and all natural acts
are to him clean and beautiful.
In his work there is a modesty that defies prudishness and a manly outspokenness that confounds
the licentious rantings of libertinism. In this he has something in common with Whitman and
every other man who has not looked askance at life.
It is a hopeful sign of the changing order of things when work such as this can be shown
here in New York. No one interested in the development of the modern spirit in art should miss
the opportunity of seeing these drawings.
J. E. Chamberlin in the Evening Mail:
An exhibition of very great importance to artists and sculptors, though doubtless it will be
pretty nearly incomprehensible to the general public, is the show of Rodin’s drawings at the Photo-
Secession galleries on Fifth Avenue.
Rodin’s drawings have been rendered quite celebrated by Arthur Symons’s glowing description
in “The Seven Arts;” ... and has displayed them in all their massive simplicity, without
mounting or other adventitious adjuncts, on the walls of the cosy little galleries of the Secession.
These drawings are notes for sculpture. They were all made from nature and at white heat;
they are, so to speak, the original and nervous snapshots of a great artist-genius. What Rodin has
seen in a thousand poses he has swiftly drawn ; that is to say what has interested him; for in many
of these wonderful sketches he has stopped exactly where the subject ceased to interest, leaving a
foot to be indicated by a triangle, or a face by a scrawled line, with eye and mouth marked by a
mere straight line at right angles with it, as a four-year-old boy draws.
Again he draws the profile of a torso or a limb over and over again, extending it out and out,
as if the model were moving rapidly, and he were keeping up with its movements with these swift
strokes. So "snapshots" is not the word to describe these drawings, for the instantaneous photo-
graph stops when it is done — it produces a fixed result; whereas these sketches are moving, fluid ;
they produce an extraordinary effect of life, struggle and palpitation.
Strange fancies take possession of the artist as he works. Here is the back of a kneeling
woman. Her position suggests the form of a vase; so Rodin, with a few swift lines, accentuates
the resemblance, and labels the picture, “ Vase." Here is a sketch in which the profile of a limb
is drawn jagged like a saw; here are two women, close together, in whose case the point of contact
is indicated by just such a saw-line. Why ? Rodin only knows.
Then take his use of color. Many of the best of the sketches are tinted in water-colors. Why
did Rodin use colors in making sketches for sculpture ? Probably because he wanted to feel the color
that he saw at this moment, if he ever modeled the figure afterward. Some of this color is beautiful.
Its use, seldom with any gradations, but in mere uniform masses, produces an effect of something
absolutely new and marvelous in art.
In fact, in looking at this collection, one feels oneself present at the moment of the original
chaos, when all things were being made. Traditions are escaped. All preconceptions, all artifices,
are sloughed off. The genuine creative principle is at work. We are looking at the real thing.
Art has been sophisticated for six thousand years; this is the thing itself. At any rate, so we
feel. Here is art depolarized at last—deprived of its doubleness, its relations, and all its notions
and conventions.
But let us pause a moment. Some of these drawings are of surpassing grace and beauty. One
of them Rodin names “Phryne." It is full of absolute grace. Here is a head in color, which
distills beautiful mystery. Here is a slender nude form, which the artist has made still more strangely
beautiful by drawing, in pink color, another figure, still slenderer, still more graceful, within the

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