International studio (54.1914/1915)

Book Reviews

of life and the first instigations of consciousness.
The figure is marked by nearly all the later man-
nerisms, and black bronze is an ugly material in
which to represent the naked body; it would really
seem that a nobler conception might have been
presented of the radiant, beautiful, alert figure
springing dewy fresh from the hand of its Maker.
For the companion statue, Eue, was selected the
ugly and tragic moment of her remorse and
despair, and the bitter, hopeless theme is accentu-
ated by every device in the sculptor’s power,
including even the characteristics of the modern
modelling, as on the abdomen. In the considera-
tion of the statue of the Baptist, the “man sent
from God, whose name was John,” as we have
seen, the concern was apparently largely for his
pedestrianism, and the legs of this statue have
remained the most admired portion. One of the
sculptor’s admirers, M. Octave Mirbeau, was,
however, filled with enthusiasm for the “preach-
ing as though it were battle, he makes a violent
gesture which distributes anathema. . . .
His mouth vomits imprecations.” In the smaller
marble groups there is even more of what an
English critic called his “unnecessary and aggres-
sive disregard for those canons of monumental art
in the observance rather than in the contravention
of which genius should find additional modes of
expression.” And there seems to be nearly always
a perversion of the theme. In a private collection
of a resident of New York City is, however, a
small marble group of Romeo and Juliet free of
these extravagances and worthy of the subject.
The Hand of God, which Bernard Shaw says is
a reproduction of his own, holds a mass of the
unformed marble to which are stuck, not sup-
ported by, two embryonic nude figures locked
together. The famous statue of the Penseur is
officially described as that of “a prognathous
savage”; the even more famous one of Balzac was
an unintelligent attempt to express in a single
figure more than the plastic art can compass; the
Icarus selects the moment when the unhappy
youth, falling headlong, drives his face into the
rock. To walk through a gallery of Rodin’s work
is to carry away an impression of the sordidness
and ugliness of life. As a young man of twenty-
three he selected as his first work to exhibit,
A Man with a Broken Nose, and he has devoted the
best years of his life to an enoimous Gates of Hell.
As for his pencil and crayon sketches, some of
them with a very clever use of colour, there are
many which can be considered only as experiments
upon the credulity of his admirers. His defend¬

ers, moreover, in their exuberance, invent impossi-
ble arguments which they put in the mouths of
their men of straw, set up to be bowled over:
“They do not wish to be shaken out of the vain
belief that statues and pictures are meant solely
to please the eye by a prettiness which makes no
demand on the intelligence, and they shrink in
angry disgust from what is strong, original and
living.” ... . “One of the most persistent criti-
cisms brought against Rodin is . . . that he
'introduced’ a new and illegitimate sense of
movement and action into statuary instead of that
immobility, that deathlike repose, which they
seem to consider an essential attribute of the high-
est attainment in sculpture,” etc.
That these grave qualities in his work are not
inevitable is abundantly demonstrated by some of
the smaller, later pieces—-the study in baked clay
for the head of Balzac, vividly lifelike; the only
less extraordinary plaster study of a woman’s head
presented by the sculptor to the Metropolitan
Museum in 1912 and thought to be for the por-
trait of Madame R-in silver, exhibited in
1890; the group in baked clay of the Caryatid, and
others.
Nevertheless, the distance is long between this
art and that of the Venus of Melos.
OOK REVIEWS
Our Philadelphia. By E. Robins
Pennell and Joseph Pennell. (J. B.
Lippincott Company, Philadelphia and
London.) $5.00.
Like Boston, Philadelphia offers tremendous
opportunities to the artist and historian, and in
this stately tome before us many a chapter in
Philadelphia tradition is unfolded, many a bit of
old Philadelphia immortalized in full-page repro-
duction. Of these it cannot be affirmed that all
are delightful. Frankly, they are not. Take, for
instance, Independence Square and the State House,
facing page 50, where both draughtsmanship and
proportion are seriously at fault. In other cases,
too, J. Pennell has shown a certain carelessness in
architectural drawings which assails the eye with-
out being sought for. To outweigh this criticism,
however, very many of the drawings are most
pleasant and artistic, recalling Philadelphia’s odd
buildings and spacious streets with marvellous
fidelity. Elizabeth Pennell has recorded the
“atmosphere” of Philadelphia, its citizens and
their lives, with affectionate and humorous
touches, extremely graphic, and reaching far


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