Camera Work: A Photographic Quarterly (1911 (Heft 34-35))

Each viewpoint affords a special pleasure. Today the knowledge of the human
form is so limited and perverted that even painters copying from the nude
cannot produce a perfect type, but represent beauty with all the deficiencies
of form of the various models they employ.
So what is the use of attempting it over and over again! Art should be as
individual as public. Most artists forget this obligation to humanity. The
quicker an impression is called forth the more ardent and convincing it
generally is. People know too little about beauty of line to appreciate a series
of curves and undulations. Their knowledge is fragmentary as beauty itself.
But they still appreciate a rock of curious shape, a tree, a beautiful fleeting
form. It is there that modern sculpture begins. The theory that symmetry
alone can yield us pleasant feelings has long been discarded. Greek art starts
from unity and reaches diversity, Japanese art starts from diversity and soars
to unity. It all depends on coherence of construction.
Thus, Rodin sacrificed everything to one broad immediate effect, to
brevity and concentration. The “Balzac” can be viewed and enjoyed from
as many different viewpoints as the stereotype statue, but the pleasures granted
will resemble each other. It is always the total effect that impresses itself upon
our observation. There is little opportunity for detail scrutiny; it is always
the general effect of a bulky shape, the silhouette of a human form struggling
in a chaos of matter.
The treatment of the surface is painter-like. It is like a chiaroscural
composition in high relief. It is the vibratory technique of impressionism
applied to sculpture. The surface in itself is interesting only by contrast, it
produces the subtleties of monochrome, and these produce tone in actual
form, as a statue is after all but an expression of plane figure. If you should
chip off a piece here or there,1rthere would still be a chance of making a master-
piece of form.
Rodin’s “ Balzac” deals rather with the beauty of elemental geometrical
lines and forms than the symmetry of the intricate human shape. The feelings
are esthetic but do not belong to the domain of sculpture proper, as we have
understood it for ages past, but to a more instinctive appreciation of form
that still finds a lyrical echo in every human breast. It makes an appeal to our
most primitive mode of perception and thereby creates vague emotional feel-
ings, suggestive of mystery and mysticism.
It is supposed to be a symbolical representation of the poet, of Balzac’s
genius. I would rather say of the genius of any great poet. Surely Whitman
or Carlyle could be represented in a similar way.
There is but little of the actual man left. Balzac in his dressing-gown
changed into a huge stone image. The wonderful part of it is that every sug-
gestion and representation of fact, save an exquisite vision of the face, has been
eliminated. Nothing remains but the intangible expressed by the most tangible
of material. The boundary lines are shifting, because they are unusual. Not
that they lack grace, but because they are austere, of vertical tendency, lines of
peculiar structure and masculine sweep as we have not seen except in Assyrian
and Chinese sculpture. It gives the impression—if seen in the open—of being

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