Over the years, the sculptor who moved me most was Auguste Rodin, whose Burgers of Calais continues to symbolize for me the heights of human greatness. The work commemorates the men of the French city of Calais, who in 1347 responded to the offer of the victorious English king who had besieged their city but promised not to destroy it if there were six volunteers who would come forth to die on behalf of their fellows. As things turned out, the valor of the six inspired royal mercy, and none was put to death.
The life of the artist, however, is marred by many questionable relations with women. The very mix of good and evil is instructive, since our strengths and weaknesses are so intimately linked, and there is a continuum between the immoral, the immature, the moral according to social custom, and the magnificently moral. Rodin regarded woman as rebellious and fallen temptress, and as life-giving, inspiring, and saving. To Helène von Hindenburg he wrote, “God is too great to send us direct inspiration; he takes precautions relative to our weakness and sends us earthly angels. . . . For an artist, a soft woman is his most powerful dispatch, she is holy, she rises up in our heart, in our genius, and in our force, she is a divine sower who sows love in our hearts in order that we can put it back a hundred times into our work.” Rodin’s passion for woman was inextricably interwoven with his passion for other themes that animated his career: beauty, nature, life, mystery, creation, and love.
Many people do not expect moral conduct of artists, whose gifts carry them beyond mere social conformity. Clearly a life in which truth, beauty, and goodness are not maturely integrated can express intellectual, emotional, and even spiritual value. Nevertheless, the question remains open whether their works might have been still greater had they achieved a finer integration of these values in their lives.
“RodinSelfportrait” by Auguste Rodin – A.M. Matveeva, “Rodin”, Iskusstvo, Moscow, 1962. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RodinSelfportrait.jpg#mediaviewer/File:RodinSelfportrait.jpg
“Auguste Rodin-Burghers of Calais London (photo)”. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Auguste_Rodin-Burghers_of_Calais_London_(photo).jpg#mediaviewer/File:Auguste_Rodin-Burghers_of_Calais_London_(photo).jpg
http://www.musee-rodin.fr/sites/musee/files/styles/zoom/public/resourceSpace/840_be83fbd1bc46270.jpg?itok=_mI7M0Te
A subject close to my heart, and a great choice of an artist to focus on! Rodin really does seem to embody some of the extremes we often think of with artists, though touched with an exceptional greatness.
I think, though, that there are a number of “optical illusions” that are easy to be tricked by in thinking about the life of artists. We tend to think of them as being more libertine than, say, businesspeople, but it’s not clear to me that the lives of famous artists are necessarily any more morally chaotic on average than, say, those of Wall Street tycoons. My sense is that since artists are generally allowed more freedom in their dress and manner (though this varies greatly between genres), their actions tend to stand out more.
Similarly, I think that a lot depends on which artists become popular and influential and which have lives that make the most striking and memorable material for biographies and classroom instruction. For example, I suspect that most of us can remember more biographical details from the life of Mozart than that of Bach. We know far more about the life and work of Rodin than, say, William Dyce, but was Rodin really a greater artist in the deepest sense? It doesn’t seem so to me, but both Rodin’s art and his life have elements that are of far greater interest to most people.
I think a lot depends on the genre, location, and era as well. I’m not a scholar of the period but it seems to me that the so-called Flemish Primitive painters, for example, would not have been thought of as being any different in terms of conventional responsibility than anyone else of their general station in life. Jan Van Eyck was even entrusted with important diplomatic assignments. Also, it probably helped that those artists had to be a part of a guild structure and that a typical studio then was more like a small factory than what is normal today.
In the artistic worlds which I am most familiar with, wildlife an natural history art, the most successful artists are mostly rather ordinary-seeming people, other than being exceptionally outdoorsy and artistic. I find it interesting to contrast the life of Rodin with that of James Perry Wilson, the great landscape and diorama background artist.
http://peabody.yale.edu/james-perry-wilson
http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/2009/01/james-perry-wilsons-dioramas-part-1.html
He was a quiet, almost retiring man, respected by all who knew him for his high ethical standards, as well as his accomplishments not only as a painter but as a mathematician, musician, and scholar. In spite of the fact that his works have been viewed by tens if not hundreds of millions, are capable of great esthetic power and described by many as having deep spiritual qualities, he was virtually unknown throughout his life. Even now his paintings can be found occasionally on Ebay for a relative pittance.
In part he is so little known because his work was by nature and design meant to be anonymous. He is often called “the invisible painter” because he studiously avoided all deliberate mannerism in his work. In fact, one of his favorite mottos was “Ars est celare artem”–“True art is to conceal art.” His work is work is experiencing a (very) minor upswing in interest at the moment, but for these and many other reasons I can’t imagine him receiving anything like the attention that Rodin or countless others receive. At least not in my lifetime.
I don’t mean to deny the greatness of Rodin’s accomplishments, or to pull matters away from the deeper themes and toward art history and sociology. My hope is that some contrast will be useful to the discussion.
My conviction is that greater integrity always leads to greater art, all else being equal, but not necessarily to more vivid biography or popularity. It’s the “all else being equal” part, though, that makes this subject both so difficult to understand and so fascinatingly instructive.
Thank you Carl, for your excellent and learned comment! It is essential to balance popular images with counterexamples.
I followed the links you provided and found myself entranced with the paintings of James Perry Wilson. I could not stop looking at what was available there until I had seen everything that was included online. You are right to wish that he were better known. This example is a reminder that some of the best persons, and some of the most accomplished, are practically unknown.
This could have been my thesis! I don’t know where to begin, but one example of powerful and beautiful art is Fra Angelico. But then we have the problem of context. The creative milieu of Rodin was quite different from that of the past. Art/art making — these are not generic or timeless themes. The roles of art, the roles of the artist, and the process of art making have varied greatly from period to period, culture to culture. In that light we might ask a different question: would any art be greater if the culture that produced it had a greater integration of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. But also this: does the virtuous person — the person who has integrated these values — grasp the greatness in art even where it is not so transparent better than one whose virtues are lesser?
Charles, if I’m understanding your last question right, Brand Blanshard (who seems to be something of a James Perry Wilson among philosophers) touches on it in the last chapter of his book “The Uses of a Liberal Education” in a chapter titled “Admiration.” Roughly, he argues that our admiration is greatest in those areas in which we are strongest. “The girl who turns on Pablo Casals on her phonograph because she likes his playing is revealing to others, and to herself, something significant about her mind, for she would hardly feel the way she does about the master musician unless there were music in her own soul.” Also, “Our admirations, then, are diagnostic of what we are. Now for their second service: they help us translate our newfound powers into action; the supply interest and zest in trying out a new line.” And, “Some people seem to have no chords in their nature that can be set in vibration by greatness of any kind, and some people who once had them seem to have lost them.”
“Admiration is the path along which greatness is transmitted.”
There are a couple of chapters about art in the book that also address themes in this thread.
Thank you, Carl. That is very nice. I am familiar with Blanshard, but not that book. I need to check it out; currently my department (humanities) is going through a period of self doubt and this book may be useful to for some things we are working on.
A significant polarity (I prefer to think complementarity) in aesthetics is emphasis on form (exemplified by Kant) and emphasis on content, including historical context (exemplified by Hegel, who analyzed the various relations between form and content as his primary tool to interpret the history of art). The museums I’ve been seeing for the past several years tend to emphasize historical understanding in the information they provide.
To get a balanced sense of the relative importance of artist and his or her cultural milieu is not easy, given the Kantian exaltation of the solitary genius and the formalist “new criticism” of the mid-twentieth century which for decades succeeded in largely discrediting the importance of biographical understanding in understanding works of art.
If you don’t mind I would like to share with you an aphorism I wrote the other day about the attacks on beauty and the responses to beauty, these being from a powerful and unfortunate group of ideologues.
“Exiling beauty for the sake of ideological purity darkens the world and leaves the womb of our deepest joys barren.”
Just as spirituality enhances morality, so does morality enhance all legitimate activities. I wonder if the perception of the value of a work of art is linked to the morality of the artist once it is known.
I wonder what the women that Rodin was involved in this way thought about him and his art.
Dr. Perry
One was the sculptor Camille Claudel. Some art historians believe that she not only inspired him spiritually, but in his own art as well. There are two films about her, one from the 80’s or early 90’s, the other from not that long ago.
Thanks Charles.
My biographical information on this topic comes from long-time Rodin scholar Ruth Butler: Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1993). She reports that many of Rodin’s relations with women were abjectly asymmetrical, even though at the end, the author on balance defended him because of how much he helped those he employed as models, befriended, and fell in love with.