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

form in every conceivable position, conscious or unconscious, and as such were clearly of great use
to the maker. Possibly they may be of value to students, but the Secessionists of photography can
scarcely expect the wider circle of amateurs to feel more than a gentle sense of curiosity satisfied.
Rodin is by all odds the most interesting, the most talked-of sculptor to-day, and anything
that comes from his hand is worth seeing. We have here a hint of the preliminary studies for
groups when several figures are placed in contact. We see the germ of “ L’Homme qui Marche,”
the headless, armless torso on unfinished feet which appeared in plaster at the last Salon, a figure
that forced the critics to see the modeling of the back to the exclusion of everything else. These
colored and uncolored sketches are like that figure. Each contains a note understood by the sculptor.
Each is a big thumb-nail sketch for further reference.
Arthur Hoeber in the Globe:
Rodin is, of course, a name to conjure with, and the announcement that there would be an
exhibition of three score drawings by this distinguished French sculptor at the galleries of the Photo-
Secession, 291 Fifth Avenue, was sufficient to excite many anticipations, though it must be said the
work will be as a sealed book to the average public. To the artist, however, it means much and is
pregnant with suggestiveness. Yet these jottings—for they are no more than that — are, indeed,
the merest suggestions or impressions, working notes rather of movement than of form, full of
character in a way, too, but most loosely indicated, with now and then a thin wash spread over them,
so carelessly indeed that not even the contour has been adhered to always. And, as in everything
that Rodin has done, there is nothing in the least conventional about any of them, in pose, action,
or arrangement. For that matter most of them seem impossible in their attitude. There is danger,
too, that the student may be misled by many of them, forgetful that prior to the rendering of these
the great sculptor ground away at the academic until he was able to forget his technique and let
himself go to the making of abstract thoughts.
Arthur Symons, in an essay on Rodin, writes of the man so-intelligently that a quotation from
him may be explanatory. He says : “In the drawings, which constitute in themselves so inter-
esting a development of his art, there is little of the delicacy of beauty. They are notes for the
‘ instantanés,’ and they note only movement, expression. They are done in two minutes, by a mere
gallop of the hand over paper, with the eyes fixed on some unconscious pose of the model. And
here it would seem (if, indeed, accident did not enter so largely into the matter) that a point in
sentiment has been reached in which the perverse idealism of Baudelaire has disappeared and a
simpler kind of cynicism takes its place. In these astonishing drawings from the nude we see woman
carried to a further point of simplicity than even in Degas; woman the animal; woman, in a strange
sense, the idol. Not even the Japanese have simplified drawing to this illuminating scrawl of four
lines, enclosing the whole mystery of the fiesh. Each drawing indicates, as if in the rough block of
stone, a singie violent movement.... And these drawings with their violent simplicity of
appeal, have the distinction of all abstract thought or form. . . . For, it must be remembered,
these are the drawings of a sculptor, notes for a sculptor, thus indicating form as the sculptor sees it,
with more brevity and simpler in outline than the painter." The work may be seen until Jan. 21,
from 10 until 6 o’clock
W. B. McCormick in the Press:
Strange are the things that are done in a great man’s name and under the beclouding influence
of “art": This moral reflection is induced by the opening of an exhibition of fifty-eight drawings
by Auguste Rodin in the Photo-Secession Gallery, No. 291 Fifth Avenue, which we believe are
the first of their kind ever to be shown in this country and which may be seen until January 21. For
the purpose of the exhibition the members of the Photo-Secession have issued a pamphlet containing
some inspired nonsense about Rodin’s drawings, by Arthur Symons, who writes with equal glibness
and with equal fatuity on all manifestation of art. As a matter of fact these drawings should never
have been shown anywhere but in the sculptor’s studio, for they are simply notes dashed off, studies
of the human form — chiefly of nude females—that are too purely technical to have much general
interest except that of a not very elevating kind. Stripped of all “ art atmosphere" they stand as
drawings of nude women in attitudes that may interest the artist who drew them, but which are not
for public exhibition. With the pencil sketches are also wash-drawings of the same sort, only one

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