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

penciled outline. Why did he do that ? Was it not beause he bowed for the moment before an ideal
of beauty that he saw in his own soul, and which has been implanted there by the life and esthetic
struggle and aspiration or unnumbered generations ?
Rodin assumes to have reached the point where he finds all things beautiful. He tell us that
there is nothing ugly any more. All nature is beautiful—the figure of a washerwoman just as much
so as that of Diana. But all the rest of us see that sometimes he yields to an impulse to represent
things with heavenly grace and beauty ; and though he may not permit himself to recognize this
distinction, he obeys a power in him that is stronger than his reason.
In any case, all problems apart, this exhibition is artistically the most important that is to be
seen in this city at present. It is illuminating in a high degree. It will remain open until
January 21.
James Huneker in the Sun:
Fifty-eight drawings of August Rodin’s are shown at the Photo-Secession Galleries, 291 Fifth
Avenue (between Thirtieth and Thirty-first streets), until January 28. They are the swift
notations of a sculptor whose eye is never satisfied, whose desire to pin on paper the most
evanescent movements of the human machine is almost a mania. In Lawton’s “ Life of Rodin”
there is a chapter devoted to his drawings and dry point engravings (that is, engravings executed
on the naked copper, without the use of the etcher’s wax). The French sculptor avoids studied
poses. The model tumbles down anywhere, in any contortion or relaxation she wishes. Practically
instantaneous is the method adopted by Rodin to preserve the fleeting attitudes, the first shiver of
textures. He draws rapidly with his eye on the model. It is a mere scrawl, a few enveloping
lines, a silhouette. But vitality is in it. For his purposes a mere memorandum of a motion.
These extraordinary drawings at the Photo-Secession will prove valuable to students. A sculptor
has made them, not a painter. It will be well to observe the distinction. We have seen in Paris
almost a complete set of Rodin’s drawings. A judicious selection has been made in this present
collection, as all Rodin would be impossible in a city where we are shocked by the exquisite plastic
attitudes of a Salomé or a Thais into most drastic platitudes.
Charles DeKay in the Evening Post:
One or two little galleries of the Photo-Secession at No. 291 Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth
Street displayed, in a rather uncommon and very pretty fashion under glass plates affixed to the
wall, a lot of line sketches of the nude. If their surroundings are highly esthetic and severely
artistic, with a large A, the drawings themselves may be called X, if not XX. They are by a
sculptor whom his admirers call the sculptor, without qualification or comment ; they are by
Auguste Rodin.
Living in a community which insists that even babies must wear clothes, not for warmth and
health, but in the interest of what we are pleased to call morality, Rodin for years has tried to
supply the lack of nudity which was visible on every hand in Old Greece and Recent Japan, by
keeping his studio at the temperature that Princess Pauline Bonaparte would have approved, and by
causing a number of persons to loaf about in that balmy air without a stitch upon them. Imagine
a Turkish bath, without steam, plus plaster and plaster casts, clay figures in various stages of
anatomical disturbance, a few sofas, divans, and chairs—and a half-dozen Adams and Eves walking,
sitting, and lying about, talking to each other or engaged in some game, all the while striving to
forget that they are not clothed and are models hired by the day, and that some one is always
watching them, ever on the alert to capture their lines and curves, their unconscious poses and
actions as they move.
The drawings at the Photo-Secession tell the story from the sculptor’s point ot vantage. Here
we have the daily or rather hourly report by Rodin of what he found in the outlines of some of his
nude models. Faces are the merest twist of the pencil ; hands and feet are like those of ginger-
bread figures, all in outlines, some with addition of faint colors.
Gigantic female forms more repulsive than those of the daughters of Anak, whom Zorn finds
in his native Sweden, lounge or kneel, or sprawl, or stand with uplifted arms. Sometimes one gets
a bold line indicating a cheek, a breast, a thigh ; sometimes a second line corrects the contour of
a Gargantuan calf. They form a small part of a mass of memoranda for a student of the human
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