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

ARTHUR SYMONS ON RODIN’S DRAWINGS*

IN ART matters the month of January was a very live one in New
York; several important exhibitions took place simultaneously, but
none attracted more or probably as much attention as that of the
Rodin drawings at the Little Galleries of the Photo-Secession. During the
three weeks these were shown, connoisseurs, art-lovers of every type, and
students from far and near flocked to the garret of “291.” It was an unusual
assemblage—even for that place—that gathered there to pay homage to
one of the greatest artists of all time. It may be said to the credit of New
York—provincial as it undoubtedly is in art matters generally—that in this
instance a truer and more spontaneous appreciation could nowhere have
been given to these remarkable drawings. For the benefit of the readers of
Camera Work who did not have the pleasure of seeing the exhibition we
reprint the text of the Catalogue in full:
In this exhibition an opportunity is, for the first time, given the American
public to study drawings by Rodin. The fifty-eight now shown were selected
for this purpose by Rodin and Mr. Steichen. To aid in their fuller under-
standing we reprint from Arthur Symons’ “Studies in Seven Arts” the fol-
lowing extract from his sympathetic essay on Rodin:
“In the drawings, which constitute in themselves so interesting a
development of his art, there is little of the delicacy of beauty. They are
notes for the clay, ‘instantanees,’ 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
flesh. Each drawing indicates, as if in the rough block of stone, a single
violent movement. Here a woman faces you, her legs thrown above her
head; here she faces you with her legs thrust out before her, the soles of
her feet seen close and gigantic. She squats like a toad, she stretches herself
like a cat, she stands rigid, she lies abandoned. Every movement of her
body, violently agitated by the remembrance, or the expectation, or the act
of desire, is seen at an expressive moment. She turns upon herself in a
hundred attitudes, turning always upon the central pivot of the sex, which
emphasizes itself with a fantastic and frightful monotony. The face is but
just indicated, a face of wood, like a savage idol; and the body has rarely
any of that elegance, seductiveness, and shivering delicacy of life which we
find in the marble. It is a machine in movement, a monstrous, devastating
machine, working mechanically, and possessed by the one rage of the animal.
Often two bodies interlace each other, flesh crushing upon flesh in all the

•Reprinted from Camera Work, Number XXII.

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