Auguste Rodin - In the Alcove

There's no denying as to what is the main event at Tate Modern's The Making of Rodin exhibition. The largest room is given over to a raised platform that - if we glance towards the huge black and white photograph that dominates the western wall - mirrors the mess, the mutability, the inspiration and the nascent genius forming in the French sculptor's studio. 
 
Here we find The Thinker. Look at the way that he anxiously scrunches his feet. Whatever he's thinking about seems to cause him pain. Perhaps it's not some tricky scientific problem or philosophical quandary, but rather a distressing emotional matter? We walk on and find variations on the theme of the writer Honoré de Balzac. Not just depictions of his body and head - pot-bellied, bent nosed - but also the disembodied mould of his shabby dressing gown. Visually, you can almost sense where the French novelist's inspiration is coming from, and you find that that place might smell something like vapour rub. That I later learned that the finished bronze is meant to depict Balzac 'dreamily masturbating' under this dressing gown, adds a less classical lustre to proceedings. Perhaps that is the truth behind The Thinker's pondering, back turned prudishly on the onanistic author of La Comedie Humaine. It's a busy room that stays with you, comfortably side-stepping a danger that these prototypes and ideas might fall short of the finished masterpieces occupying the wider world.

     

It is on the eastern side of this re-created studio that we find a small alcove hosting a selection of exquisite drawings and designs, and a work of, what at first seems to be, a half-finished and abandoned block of marble. You approach, not entirely interested, eager to take in the drawings instead, but as you close in on Jeux de Nymphes (Nymph Games) you become gradually aware of the two embracing lovers hidden within the confines of the stone. Circling the piece, letting your eyes fall upon it from different vantage points, you find the shapes shifting and, as if animated, revealing different facets. The barest hint of two mouths locked into a kiss; limbs stretching, parting and tangling; torsos entwined in this quiet secluded corner that they have secured for themselves. It is mesmerising.

 

Jeux de Nymphes

It also seems to me, confirmation of Rodin's much discussed – and often refuted – Modernist credentials. I could not help but immediately think of the Cubist works of Braque and Picasso and their attempts to fix mutability and motion in one frame. The rough date of its creation, sometime in the first decade of the twentieth-Century, place it right at the heart of the well-springs of Modernism.  

Jeux de Nymphes

You take a breath and turn your attention to the drawings. They complement Jeux de Nymphes wonderfully. They have a liquidity and motion that shimmers, sending your eyes back and left towards the lovers in the sculpture. And though you sense the larger, three-dimensional works that they could - and sometimes would - go on to inspire, they stand up brilliantly as works of art in themselves. The still yet wonderfully energetic swirl of the woman in Minerva had me reaching for T.S. Eliot's lines - 'at the still point: there the dance is' - and as the poet paradoxically goes on to write: 'do not call it fixity'. And the careful choice of colour – I loved the kingfisher hues of the second drawing - seem to me deliberate, and therefore indicative of a desire to send these works out into the artistic ether entirely on their own merit.

 

Minerva

Martin-pêcheur

I returned a few days later and took in the little alcove again. Something was different. The drawings had been changed - a new selection occupied the walls - and this added to the lovely flow and mutability that permeated the room. And looking again at the quiet show-stopper that is Jeux de Nymphes, I began to think of lines that examined a very different piece of sculpture.   

 
The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke - who spent time employed by Rodin as a kind of secretary and observer – wrote a poem called the 'Archaic Torso of Apollo'. Reading this work again, it wasn't so much the singular, unfinished torso that formed in my mind's eye, but rather a recollection of the startling fluidity and eroticism of Rodin's lovers. 

 
    We cannot know his legendary head 
    with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso 
    is still suffused with brilliance from inside, 
    like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, 
    gleams in all its power. Otherwise 
    the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could 
    a smile run through the placid hips and thighs 
    to that dark center where procreation flared. 
 
    Otherwise this stone would seem defaced 
    beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders 
    and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur: 
 
    would not, from all the borders of itself, 
    burst like a star: for here there is no place 

    that does not see you. You must change your life. 

 
The point - or part of the point - of Rilke's poem has always seemed to me to be a cajoling of the imagination, the imperative to seek out those lopped off missing limbs, to conjure up a smile, or to feel the 'wild beast's fur' that would have adorned the man. But now, reading again, I feel that Rodin had achieved something different, gone even further than the anonymous ancient sculptor. We look at the lovers and steady the frame, and then we move our eyes a few centimetres to the right or left, or let them drift backwards and forwards, focusing on different parts of the marble. 

Jeux de Nymphes

And then the blanks that Rilke's poem seems to be asking us to fill in with our imagination are rendered visible by Rodin's genius. We don't have to do the work of the imagination: the sculptor has done it for us. We stare at the piece of art, and it stares right back at us, jolting us out of a reverie and prescribing a leap: the affirmation that great art, great beauty, is a command to live. 'Du mußt dein Leben ändern' (the bold German words ring out and are, indeed, a wonderful complement to the sculpture). You leave the little alcove and find yourself back in 'Rodin's studio'. The stillness disappears and the bustle returns. The Thinker ruminates, Balzac's mind still scribbles as his hand ferrets, and you want to travel the world and change your life.