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

of which has any apparent beauty, this being a standing nude figure of a young woman holding a
drapery of blue and white, but in such a manner that no detail of her figure is lost. Some of these
wash-drawings were touched up with ink, and so loosely brushed in, that the medium has flown down
over the drawing in such a manner as to mar the general effect of the sketch. It may be all very
well to talk about the “ drawing ” and the other qualities of a purely technical kind in these studies.
But they are most decidely not the sort of thing to offer to public view even in a gallery devoted to
preciosity in artistic things.
Royal Cortissoz in the Tribune:
Some drawings by Auguste Rodin have been placed on the walls of the Photo-Secession. Con-
sidered as a kind of studio driftwood, they are of interest to students of the French sculptor. They
show how with a few broad touches of wash and some seemingly careless lines he can note the
flow of a contour, the action of muscles, the subtler elements of movement, and even an emotional
mood, a nuance of expression. This skill, however, is discounted for the connoisseur of draftsmanship
by the scrawling and sometimes meaningless touch of the artist. His sense of beauty rarely peeps
forth. The effect of truth he gains, of truth hinted at rather than expressed, is comparable to that
which you find in the work of a clever caricaturist. It is easy to believe that such memoranda as
these might be valuable to the sculptor himself. They have not the beauty or the character for
which the fragments of pure technique left by a master are cherished.
The Scrip (February) said:
Rodin’s drawings, on view at the rooms of the Photo-Secessionists, 291 Fifth Avenue, are as
far outside the realm of convention as Rodin’s sculpture. If one desires to know how an artistic
conception first strikes the mind of an artist one can not, of course, do better than consult the sketch-
books of the latter. There he will see what first claims attention, form, movement, expression,
color, or—save the mark—finish. It is only to a certain rare type of man that the conception
comes full-armed like Minerva. If we glance at the Michael Angelo sketches in the British Museum,
for example, we shall find page after page devoted to careful notation of the muscles about the
waist. There are pages of men and women, bent forward, bent back, leaning to one side or to
the other side, all of them with the merest outline to represent their bodies and faces, except where
the folds of the flesh follow or conceal the waist muscles — here the drawing is careful, precise,
studied. If we look at the sketch-book containing the drawings of William Blake we see that two
ideas, that of movement and that of structural composition, were in his mind from the beginning. He
erects the skeleton of his composition and with line and gesture indicates extreme motion or extreme
repose, all else may wait. Rodin’s drawings fling defiance at every appeal to that non-esthetic
sense within us that demands what we call feeling in a picture. Nothing could be more significant
than the way in which feeling is ignored in these synthetic outlines with their little smudges of
shadow here and there — precisely where they make the forms loom out of the empty paper like
Greek marbles, with an occasional sharp pen line that throws into prominence a drapery or limb,
with the mad scramble of a free pencil at play with its subject and somehow evoking in the course
of its gambols a clear, sane, logical relation of lines and spaces, with blotches and streaks of color,
strong or faint, but invariably of a sort to give the character of the figure an increased emphasis.
Mr. Symons has very cleverly suggested that the faces are those of idols, but to say even this
of them is to give them to much importance. They are Gothic faces — the kind that leer out from
church walls as gargoyles or chimeras. They are the sport of a romantic mind to which construction
and organic form make the primary appeal and to which details of extraneous ornament may as well
be fantastic as otherwise. Apparently to M. Rodin the human face is fantastic rather than classic
and who, speaking frankly, may say him nay ? Yet who has turned marble into features of a tenderer
beauty ? Who has more completely realized the subtle graces of form and surface that make a total
of irresistible charm in a young face ? It is when he is talking to himself as in these unpremeditated
sketches that he uses the language of satire.
Occasionally, as in the stately little study for a Phryne, he allows the expression to become a
part of his scheme. This handsome young figure, as slim as a flower, with head thrown back,
insolent eyes cast down, waving hair and long blue draperies falling over the left arm, is a very
complete rendering of the idea. In the “ Calomnie” also there is a Blake-like significance in the

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