REALISM AND IMPRESSIONISM

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REALISM AND IMPRESSIONISM

PAINTING

France

"Can Jupiter survive the lightning rod?" asked Karl Marx, not long after the middle of the century. The question, im­plying that the ancient god of thunder and lightning was now in jeopardy through science, sums up the dilemma we felt in the sculptor Carpeaux's The Dance. The French poet and art critic Charles Baudelaire was addressing himself to the same problem when, in 1846, he called for paintings that expressed "the heroism of modern life." At that time only one painter was willing to make an artistic creed of this demand: Baudelaire's friend Gustave Courbet (1819-1877).

COURBET AND REALISM. Proud of his rural back­ground-he was born in Omans, a village near the French­Swiss border-and a socialist in politics, Courbet had begun as a Neo-Baroque Romantic in the early 1840s; but by 1848, under the impact of the revolutionary upheavals then sweep­ing over Europe, he had come to believe that the Romantic emphasis on feeling and imagination was merely an escape from the realities of the time. The modern artist must rely on his own direct experience ("1 cannot paint an angel be­cause I have never seen one," he said); he must be a Realist. As a descriptive term, "realism" is not very precise. For Cour­bet, it meant something akin to the "naturalism" of Car­avaggio. As an admirer of Louis Le Nain and Rembrandt he had, in fact, strong links with the Caravagg­esque tradition, and his work, like Caravaggio's, was de­nounced for its supposed vulgarity and lack of spiritual content.

The storm broke in 1849, when he exhibited The Stone Breakers, the first canvas fully embodying his pro­grammatic Realism. Courbet had seen two men working on a road, and had asked them to pose for him in his studio. He painted them life size, solidly and matter-of~factly, with none of Millet's overt pathos or sentiment: the young man's face is averted, the old one's half hidden by a hat. Yet he cannot have picked them casually: their contrast in age is significant-one is too old for such. heavy work, the other too young. Endowed with the dignity of their symbolic status, they do not turn to us for sympathy. Courber's friend, the socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, likened them to a parable from the Gospels.

During the Paris Exposition of 1855, where works by In­gres and Oelacroix were prominently displayed, Courbet brought his pictures to attention by organizing a private ex­hibition in a large wooden shed and by distributing a "man­ifesto of Realism." The show centered on a huge canvas, the most ambitious of his career, entitled Studio of a Painter: A Real Allegory Summarizing My Seven Years of Life as an Art­ist. "Real allegory" is something of a teaser (alle­gories, after all, are unreal by definition); Courbet meant either an allegory couched in the terms of his particular Realism, or one that did not conflict with the "real" identity of the figures or objects embodying it.

The framework is familiar; Courbet's composition clearly belongs to the type of Velazquez' The Maids of Honor and Goya's The Family of Charles IV. But now the artist has moved to the center; his visitors are here his guests, not royal patrons who enter whenever they wish. He has invited them specially, for a purpose that becomes evident only upon thoughtful reflection; the picture does not yield its full meaning unless we take the title seriously and inquire into Courbet's relation to this assembly.

There are two main groups: on the left are "the people"­ types rather than individuals, drawn largely from the artist's home environment at Ornans-hunters, peasants, workers, a Jew, a priest, a young mother with her baby. On the right, in contrast, we see groups of portraits representing the Pari­sian side of Courber's life-clients, critics, intellectuals (the man reading is Baudelaire). All of these people are strangely passive, as if they were waiting for we know not what. Some are quietly conversing among themselves, others seem im­mersed in thought; hardly anybody looks at Courbet. They are not his audience, but a representative sampling of his social environment.

Only two people watch the artist at work: a small boy, in­tended to suggest "the innocent eye," and the nude model. What is her role? In a more conventional picture, we would identify her as Inspiration, or Courbet's Muse, but she is no less "real" than the others here; Courbet probably meant her to be Nature, or that undisguised Truth which he proclaimed to be the guiding principle of his art (note the emphasis on the clothing she has just taken off). Significantly enough, the center group is illuminated by clear, sharp daylight but the background and the lateral figures are veiled in semi­darkness, to underline the contrast between the artist-the active creator-and the world around him that waits to be brought to life.

MANET AND THE "REVOLUTION OF THE COLOR PATCH." Courbet's Studio helps us to understand a picture that shocked the public even more: Manet's Luncheon on the Grass, showing a nude model accompanied by two gentlemen in frock coats. Edouard Manet (1832-1883) was the first to grasp Courbet's full importance-his Lun­cheon, among other things, is a tribute to the older artist. He particularly offended contemporary morality by Juxtaposing the nude and nattily attired figures in an outdoor setting, the more so since the noncommittal title offered no "higher" significance. Yet the group has so formal a pose that Manet certainly did not intend to depict an actual event. Perhaps the meaning of the canvas lies in this denial of plausibility, for the scene fits nei­ther the plane of everyday experience nor that of allegory.

The Luncheon, as a visual manifesto of artistic freedom, is much more revolutionary than Courbet's; it asserts the painter's privilege to combine whatever elements he pleases for aesthetic effect alone. The nudity of the model is "ex­plained" by the contrast between her warm, creamy flesh tones and the cool black-and-gray of the men's attire. Or, to put it another way, the world of painting has "natural laws" that are distinct from those of familiar reality, and the painter's first loyalty is to his canvas, not to the outside world. Here begins an attitude that was later summed up in the doctrine of Art for Art's Sake and became a bone of conten­tion between progressives and conservatives for the rest of the century. Manet himself disdained such controversies, but his work attests to his lifelong devotion to "pure painting"- to the belief that brushstrokes and colour patches themselves, not what they stand for, are the artist's primary reality. Among painters of the past, he found that Hals, Velazquez, and Goya had come closest to this ideal. He admired their broad, open technique, their preoccupation with light and colour values. Many of his canvases are, in fact, "pictures of pictures"-they translate into modern terms those older works that particularly challenged him. Yet he always took care to filter out the expressive or symbolic con­tent of his models, lest the beholder's attention be distracted from the pictorial structure itself. His paintings, whatever their subject, have an emotional reticence that can easily be mistaken for emptiness unless we understand its purpose.

Courbet is said to have remarked that Manet's pictures were as flat as playing cards. Looking at The Fifer, we can see what he meant. Done three years after the Lun­cheon, it is a painting without shadows (there are a few, ac­tually, but it takes a real effort to find them), hardly any modeling, and no depth. The figure looks three-dimensional only because its contour renders the forms in realistic fore­shortening; otherwise, Manet eschews all the methods de­vised since Giotto's time for transmuting a flat surface into a pictorial space. The undifferentiated light-gray background seems as near to us as the figure, and just as solid; if the fifer stepped out of the picture, he would leave a hole, like the cut-out shape of a stencil.

Here, then, the canvas itself has been redefined-it is no longer a "window," but a screen made up of flat patches of color. How radical a step this was can be readily seen if we match The Fifer against Delacroix's The Massacre at Chios, and a Cubist work such as Picasso's Three Dancers of 1925. The structure of Manet's painting obvi­ously resembles that of Picasso's, whereas Delacroix's-or even Courbet's-still follows the "window" tradition of the Renaissance. In retrospect, we realize that the revolutionary qualities of Manet's art were already to be seen, if not yet so obvious, in the Luncheon. The three figures lifted from Raphael's group of river gods form a unit nearly as shadow­less and stencil like as The Fifer; they would be more at home on a flat screen, for the chiaroscuro of their present setting, which is inspired by the landscapes of Courbet, no longer fits them.

MONET AND IMPRESSIONISM. What brought about this "revolution of the colour patch"? We do not know, and Manet himself surely did not reason it out beforehand. It is tempting to think that he was impelled to create the new style by the challenge of photography. The "pencil of nature," then known for a quarter century, had demonstrated the ob­jective truth of Renaissance perspective, but it established a standard of representational accuracy that no hand-made image could hope to rival. Painting needed to be rescued from competition with the camera. This Manet accom­plished by insisting that a painted canvas is, above all, a ma­terial surface covered with pigments-that we must look at it, not through it. Unlike Courbet, he gave no name. to the style he had created; when his followers began calling them­selves Impressionists, he refused to accept the term for his own work.

The word Impressionism had been coined in 1874, after a hostile critic had looked at a picture entitled Impression: Sunrise by Claude Monet (1840-1926), and it certainly fits Monet better than it does Manet. Monet had adopted Manet's concept of painting and applied it to landscapes done out-of­-doors. Monet's The River of 1868 is flooded with sunlight so bright that conservative critics claimed it made their eyes smart; in this flickering network of colour patches, the reflections on the water are as "real" as the banks of the Seine. Even more than The Fifer, Monet's painting is a "play­ing card"; were it not for the woman and the boat in the fore­ground, the picture would be just as effective upside-down. The mirror image here serves a purpose contrary to that of earlier mirror images: instead of adding to the illusion of real space, it strengthens the unity of the actual painted surface. This inner coherence sets The River apart from Romantic "impressions" such as Constable's Hampstead Heath, or Corot's Papigno, even though all three share the same on-the-spot im­mediacy and fresh perception.

MANET AND IMPRESSIONISM. These latter qualities came less easily to the austere and deliberate Manet; they appear in his work only after about 1870, under Monet's influence. Manet's last major picture, A Bar at the Folies­ Bergeres, of 1881-82, shows a single figure as calm-and as firmly set within the rectangle of the canvas­as the fifer, but the background is no longer neutral. A huge shimmering mirror image now fills four-fifths of the picture. The mirror, close behind the barmaid, shows the whole in­terior of the nightclub, but deprives it of three-dimensional­ity, in part by taking liberties with the scene (note how the barmaid's reflection is shown off to one side, something that is impossible in reality). The serving girl's attitude, detached and touched with melancholy, contrasts poignantly with the gaiety of her setting, which she is not permitted to share. For all its urbanity, the mood of the canvas reminds us oddly of Daumier's The Third-Class Carriage.

RENOIR. Scenes from the world of entertainment-dance halls, cafes, concerts, the theater-were favourite subjects for Impressionist painters. Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), an­other important member of the group, filled his work with the joie de vivre of a singularly happy temperament. The flirt­ing couples in Le Moulin de la Galette, dappled with sunlight and shadow, radiate a human warmth that is utterly entrancing, even though the artist permits us no more than a fleeting glance at any of them. Our role is that of the casual stroller, who takes in this slice of life in passing.

DEGAS. By contrast, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) makes us look steadily at the disenchanted pair in his cafe scene, but, so to speak, out of the corner of our eye. The design of this picture at first seems as unstudied as a snapshot (in­deed Degas practiced photography), yet a longer look shows us that everything here dovetails precisely-that the zigzag of empty tables between us and the luckless couple rein­forces their brooding loneliness. Compositions as boldly cal­culated as this set Degas apart from other Impressionists. A wealthy aristocrat by birth, he had been trained in the tradi­tion of Ingres, whom he greatly admired. Like Ingres, he de­spised portraiture as a trade but, unlike him, he acted on his conviction and portrayed only friends and relatives-individ­uals with whom he had emotional ties. His profound sense of human character lends weight even to seemingly casual scenes such as that in The Glass of Absinthe.

When he joined the Impressionists, Degas did not aban­don his early allegiance to draftsmanship. His finest works were often done in pastel (powdered pigments moulded into sticks), a medium that had a strong appeal for him since it yielded effects of line, tone, and colour simultaneously. Prima Ballerina well demonstrates this flexible tech­nique. The oblique view of the stage, from a box near the proscenium arch, has been shaped into another deliberately off-centre composition; the dancer floats above the steeply tilted floor like a butterfly caught in the glare of the footl­ights.

A decade later, The Tub is again an oblique view, but now severe, almost geometric in design: the tub and the crouching woman, both vigorously outlined, form a circle within a square, and the rest of the rectangular format is filIed by a shelf so sharply tilted that it almost shares the lane of the picture; yet on this shelf Degas has placed two pitchers (note how the curve of the small one fits the handle. the other) that are hardly foreshortened at all. Here the tension between "two-D" and "three-D" surface and depth comes close to the breaking point.

The Tub is Impressionist only in its shimmering, luminous colours. Its other qualities are more characteristic of the 80s, the first post-Impressionist decade, when many artists showed a renewed concern with problems of form.

MORISOT. The Impressionists' ranks included several women of great ability. Berthe Morisot (1841-1895), a mem­ber of the group from its inception, was influenced at first by Manet, whose brother she later married, but it is clear that he in turn was affected by her work. Her subject matter was the world she knew: the domestic life of the French upper middle class, which she depicted with sensitive un­derstanding. Morisot's early paintings, cantering on her mother and her sister Edma, have a subtle but distinct sense of alienation. Her mature work is altogether different in char­acter. The birth of her daughter in 1878 signalled a change in her art, which reached its height a decade later. Her paint­ing of a little girl reading in a room overlooking the artist's garden shows alight-filled style of her own making. Morisot applied her virtuoso brushwork with a sketch like brevity that omits non-essential details yet conveys a com­plete impression of the scene. The figure is fully integrated within the formal design; its appeal is enhanced by the pastel hues she favored. Morisot's painting radiates an air of con­tentment free of the sentimentality that often affects genre paintings of the period.

CASSATT. In 1877, the American painter Mary Cassatt (1845-1926) joined the Impressionists, becoming a tireless champion of their work. She had received a standard aca­demic training in her native Philadelphia, but had to struggle to overcome traditional barriers. Like Morisot, she was able to pursue her career as an artist, an occupation regarded as unsuitable for women, because she was independently wealthy. Cassatt was instrumental in gaining early accep­tance of Impressionist paintings in the United States through her social contacts with wealthy private collectors. Mater­nity provided the thematic and formal focus of most of her work. From her mentor Degas, as well as from her thought­ful study of Japanese prints, Cassatt developed an individual and highly accomplished style. In its oblique view, simpli­fied colour forms, and flat composition, The Bath shows Cassatt at her best and is characteristic of her mature style around 1890.

MONET'S LATER WORKS. Among the major figures of the movement. Monet alone remained faithful to the Impres­sionist view of nature. Nevertheless, his work became more subjective over time, although he never ventured into fan­tasy, nor did he abandon the basic approach of his earlier landscapes. About 1890, Monet began to paint pictures in series, showing the same subject under various conditions of light and atmosphere. These tended increasingly to resem­ble Turner's "airy visions, painted with tinted steam" as Monet concentrated on effects of coloured light; he had visited London, and knew Turner's work. His Water Lilies, Giverny is a fascinating sequel to The River across a span of almost forty years. The pond sur­face now takes up the entire canvas, so that the effect of a weightless screen is stronger than ever; the artist's brush­work, too, has greater variety and a more individual rhythm. While the scene is still based on nature, this is no ordinary landscape but one entirely of his making. On the estate at Giverny given to him late in life by the French government, the artist created a self-contained world for purely personal and artistic purposes. The subjects he painted there are as much reflections of his imagination as they are of reality. Furthermore, they convey a different sense of time. Instead of the single moment captured in The River, his Water Lilies, Giverny summarizes a shifting impression of the pond in response to the changing water as the breezes play across it.

England

REALISM. By the time Monet came to admire his work, Turner's reputation was at a low ebb in his own country. To­ward 1850, when Courbet launched his revolutionary doc­trine of Realism, a concern with "the heroism of modern life" asserted itself quite independently in English painting as well, although the movement lacked a leader of Courbet's stature and assertiveness. Perhaps the best-known example of English Realism is The Last of’ England by Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), a picture that enjoyed vast pop­ularity throughout the latter half of the century in the En­glish-speaking world. The subject-a group of emigrants as they set out on their long overseas journey-may be less ob­vious today than it once was, and it does not carry the same emotional charge. Nonetheless, there can be no question that the artist has treated an important theme taken from modern experience, and that he has done so with touching seriousness. If the pathos of the scene strikes us as a bit the­atrical-note the contrast between the brooding young cou­ple in the foreground and the "good riddance" gesture of the man at the upper left-we recognize its source in the "dumb shows" of Hogarth, whom Brown revered.

Brown's style, however, has nothing in common with Hogarth's; its impersonal precision of detail strikes us as al­most photographic; no hint of subjective "handwriting" is permitted to intervene between us and the scene depicted. Brown had acquired this painstaking technique some years earlier, after he met the Nazarenes, the group of German painters in Rome who practiced what they regarded as a "medieval" style. He in turn transmitted it to the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), who in 1848 helped to found an artists' society called the Pre- Raphaelite Brotherhood.

THE PRE-RAPHAELITES. Brown himself never actually joined the Pre-Raphaelites, but he shared their basic aim: to do battle against the frivolous art of the day by producing "pure transcripts. . . from nature" and by having "genuine ideas to express." As the name of the Brotherhood proclaims, its members took their inspiration from the "primitive" mas­ters of the fifteenth century; to that extent, they belong to the Gothic revival, which had long been an important aspect of the Romantic movement. What set the Pre-Raphaelites apart from Romanticism pure-and-simple was an urge to re­form the ills of modern civilization through their art; thus the emigrants in The Last of England dramatize the condi­tions that made them decide to leave England.

But Rossetti, unlike Brown, was not concemed with social problems; he thought of himself, rather, as a reformer of aes­thetic sensibility. His early masterpiece, Ecce Ancilla, though naturalistic in detail, is full of self­conscious archaisms such as the pale tonality, the limited range of colours, the awkward perspective, and the stress on the vertiqlls, not to mention the title in Latin. At the same time, this Annunciation radiates an aura of repressed eroti­cism that became the hallmark of Rossetti's work and exerted a powerful influence on other Pre-Raphaelites.

We can sense it even in the political cartoon by the illustrator and book designer Walter Crane (1845-1915), which shows another kind of "annunciation"; the genius of Liberty, strongly reminiscent of the style of Botticelli, brings the glad tidings of socialism to a sleeping worker who is being oppressed by capitalism in the shape of a night­marish vampire. Shades of Henry Fuseli!

MORRIS. The link between Rossetti and Crane's cartoon was William Morris (1834-1896), who started out as a Pre­-Raphaelite painter but soon shifted his interest to "art for use"-domestic architecture and interior decoration such as furniture, tapestries, and wallpapers. He wanted to displace the shoddy products of the machine age by reviving the handicrafts of the pre-industrial past, an art "made by the people, and for the people, as a happiness to the maker and the user."

Morris was an apostle of simplicity: architecture and fur­niture ought to be designed in accordance with the nature of their materials and working processes; surface decoration ought to be flat rather than illusionistic. His interiors are total environments that create an effect of quiet in­timacy. Despite Morris' self-proclaimed championship of the medieval tradition, he never imitated its forms directly but sought to capture its spirit. He invented the first original sys­tem of ornament since the Rococo-no small achievement.

Through the many enterprises he sponsored, as well as his skill as a writer and publicist, Morris became a tastemaker without peer in his day. Toward the end of the century, his influence had spread throughout Europe and America. Nor was he content to reform the arts of design alone; he saw them, rather, as a lever by which to reform modem society as a whole. As a consequence, he played an important part in the early history of Fabian socialism (the gradualist variety invented in England as an alternative to the revolutionary socialism of the Continent). Many of his artist friends, in­cluding Walter Crane, came to share his convictions, and some contributed their artistic talents to the cause. Such, then, is the background of Crane's cartoon.

United States

WHISTLER. Courbet, during the later years of his life, en­joyed considerable fame and influence abroad; the Impres­sionists gained international recognition more slowly. Surprisingly, Americans were their first patrons, responding to the new style sooner than Europeans did. At a time when no French museum would have them, Impressionist works entered public collections in the United States, and Ameri­can painters were among the earliest followers of Manet and his circle. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834-1903) came to Paris in 1855 to study painting; four years later he moved to London to spend the rest of his life, but he visited France during the 1860s and was in close touch with the rising Impressionist movement.

His best-known picture, Arrangement in Black and Gray: The Artist's Mother, reflects the influence of Manet in its emphasis on flat areas, and the likeness has the austere precision of Degas' portraits. Its fame as a symbol of our latter-day "mother cult" is a paradox of popular psychology that would have dismayed Whistler: he wanted the canvas to be appreciated for its formal qualities alone.

A witty, sharp-tongued advocate of Art for Art's Sake, he thought of his pictures as analogous to pieces of music, calling them "symphonies" or "nocturnes." The boldest ex­ample, painted about 1874, is Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket; without an explanatory subti­tle, we would have real difficulty making it out. No French painter had yet dared to produce a picture so "non-represen­tational," so reminiscent of Cozens' "blot-scapes" and Turner's "tinted steam". It was this canvas, more than any other, that prompted John Ruskin to accuse Whistler of "flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." (Since the same critic had highly praised Turner's The Slave Ship, we must conclude that what Ruskin really liked was not the tinted steam itself but the Romantic sentiment behind it.)

During Whistler's subsequent suit for libel,. he offered a definition of his aims that seems to be particularly applicable to The Falling Rocket: "I have perhaps meant rather to indi­cate an artistic interest alone in my work, divesting the pic­ture from any outside sort of interest. . . . It is an arrangement of line, form, and color, first, and I make use of any incident of it which shall bring about a symmetrical re­sult." The last phrase has special significance, since Whistler acknowledges that in utilizing chance effects, he does not look for resemblances bu t for a purely formal harmony. While he rarely practiced what he preached to quite the same ex­tent as he did in The Falling Rocket, his statement reads like a prophecy of American abstract painting.

HOMER. Whistler's gifted contemporary in America, Wins­low Homer (1836-1910), also came to Paris as a young man, but left too soon to receive the full impact of Impressionism. He was a pictorial reporter throughout the Civil War and con­tinued as a magazine illustrator until 1875. Yet he did some of his most remarkable paintings in the 1860s. Such a work is The Morning Bell; the fresh delicacy of the sunlit scene might be called "pre-Impressionist"-halfway between Corot and Monet. The picture has an extraordinarily subtle design as well: the dog, the cen­ter girl, and those at the right turn the footpath into a seesaw, its upward slant balanced by the descending line of treetops. At the same time, the tilted walkway emphasizes the reluc­tance of the trudging figure, echoed by the little dog, to enter the mill where she will spend the rest of the day. The paint­ing documents the early Industrial Revolution, before the ad­vent of child labor laws, when young people often toiled long hours at difficult jobs.

EAKINS. Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) arrived in Paris from Philadelphia about the time Homer painted The Morning Bell; he went home four years later, after receiving a conven­tional academic training, with decisive impressions of Cour­bet and Velazquez. Elements from both these artists are combined in William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River. Eakins had encountered stiff opposition for advocating tradi­tional life studies at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. To him, Rush was a hero for basing his 1809 statue for the Philadelphia Water Works on the nude model, though the figure itself was draped in a classical robe. Eakins no doubt knew contemporary European paintings of sculptors carving from the nude; these were related to the theme of Pygmalion and Galatea that was popular at the time among academic artists. Conservative critics nevertheless de­nounced William Rush Caruing His Allegorical Figure of the Schuylkill River for its nudity, despite the presence of the chaperon knitting quietly to the right, while to us the paint­ing's declaration of unvarnished truth seems an apposite fulfillment of Baudelaire's demand for pictures that express the heroism of modern life.

TANNER. Thanks in large part to Eakins' enlightened atti­tude, Philadelphia became the leading centre of minority art­ists in the United States. Eakins encouraged women and blacks to study art seriously at a time when professional ca­reers were closed to them. African-Americans had no chance to enter the arts before Emancipation, and after the Civil War the situation improved only gradually. Henry O. Tanner (1859-1937), the first important black painter, studied with Eakins in the early 1880s. Tanner's masterpiece, The Banjo Lesson, painted after he moved permanently to Paris, bears Eakins' unmistakable impress: avoiding the mawkishness of similar subjects by other American painters, the scene is rendered with the same direct realism as William Rush Carving His Allegorical Figure oj the Schuylkill River.

SCULPTURE

Impressionism, it is often said, revitalized sculpture no less than painting. The statement is at once true and misleading. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), the first sculptor of genius since Bernini, redefined sculpture during the same years that Manet and Monet redefined painting; in so doing, however, he did not follow these artists' lead. How indeed could the

effect of such pictures as The Fifer or The River be repro­duced in three dimensions and without colour?

RODIN. What Rodin did accomplish is already visible in the first piece he tried to exhibit (it was rejected, as we might expect), The Man with the Broken Nose of 1864. Earlier, he had worked briefly under Barye, whose influence may help to explain the vigorously creased surface. These welts and wrinkles produce, in polished bronze, an ever-changing pattern of reflections. But is this effect borrowed from Impressionist painting? Does Rodin dissolve three-dimensional form into flickering patches of light and dark? These fiercely exaggerated shapes pulsate with sculptural energy, and they retain this quality under whatever conditions the piece is viewed. For Rodin did not work directly in bronze; he modelled in wax or clay. How could he calculate in advance the reflections on the bronze surfaces of the casts that would ultimately be made from these models?

He worked as he did, we must assume, for an altogether different reason: not to capture elusive optical effects, but to emphasize the process of "growth"-the miracle of dead mat­ter coming to life in the artist's hands. As the colour patch for Manet and Monet is the primary reality, so are the malleable lumps from which Rodin builds his forms. Conservative crit­ics rejected The Man with the Broken Nose and Impression­ist painting on the same grounds-it was "unfinished," a mere sketch.

Sculptors, of course, had always made small, informal sketches (the plastic counterpart of drawings), but these were for the artist's private use, not for public display. Rodin was the first to make of unfinishedness an aesthetic principle that governed both his handling of surfaces and the whole shape of the work (The Man with the Broken Nose is not a bust, but a head "broken off" at the neck). By discovering what might be called the autonomy of the fragment, he res­cued sculpture from mechanical verisimilitude just as Manet rescued painting from photographic realism.

This sculptural revolution, proclaimed with such daring by Rodin at twenty-four, did not reach full force until the late 1870s. For his living, the young artist had to collaborate with officially recognized sculptors on their public commissions, mostly memorials and architectural sculpture in the Neo-Ba­roque style of Carpeaux. In 1880 he was at last entrusted with a major task, the entrance of the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs in Paris.

Rodin elaborated the commission into an ambitious en­semble called The Gates of Hell, its symbolic program in­spired by Dante's Inferno. He never finished the Gates, but they served as a matrix for countless smaller pieces that he eventually made into independent works.

The most famous of these autonomous fragments is The Thinker intended for the lintel of the Gates, whence the figure was to contemplate the panorama of de­spair below him. The ancestry of The Thinker goes back, in­directly, to the first phase of Christian art (the pensive man seated at the left in the Byzantine ivory reflects an Early Christian source); it also includes the action-in-re­pose of Michelangelo's superhuman bodies, the tension in Puget's Milo of Crotona, and the expressive dynamism of The Man with the Broken Nose. Who is The Thinker? Partly Adam, no doubt (though there is also a different Adam by Rodin, another "outgrowth" of the Gates), partly Prome­theus, and partly the brute imprisoned by the passions of the flesh. Rodin wisely refrained from giving him a specific name, for the statue fits no preconceived identity. In this new image of a man, form and meaning are one. instead of cleav­ing apart as in Carpeaux's The Dance. Carpeaux produced naked figures that pretend to be nude, while The Thinker, like the nudes of Michelangelo, is free from subservience to the undressed model.

The Kiss, an over-lifesize group in marble, also derives from the Gates. Less powerful than The Thinker, it exploits another kind of artful unfinishedness. Rodin had been impressed by the struggle of Michelangelo's "Slaves." against the remnants of the blocks that imprison them; The Kiss was planned from the start to include the mass of rough-hewn marble to which the lovers are attached and which thus becomes symbolic of their earthbound passion. The contrast of textures emphasizes the veiled sensuous softness of the bodies.

But Rodin was by instinct a modeller not a carver like Mi­chelangelo. His greatest works were intended to be cast in bronze. Even these, however reveal their full strength only when we see them in plaster casts made directly from Rodin's clay originals. The Monument to Balzac, his most daring creation remained in plaster for many years, rejected by the committee that had commissioned it.

The figure is larger than life physically and spiritually: it has the overpowering presence of a specter. Like a huge monolith, the man of genius towers above the crowd; he shares "the sublime egotism of the gods" (as the Romantics put it). Rodin has minimized the articulation of the body, so that from a distance we see only its great bulk. As we ap­proach, we become aware that Balzac is wrapped in a long, shroud like cloak. From this mass the head thrusts upward­ one is tempted to say, erupts-with elemental force. When we are close enough to make out the features clearly, we sense beneath the disdain an inner agony that stamps Balzac as the kin of The Man with the Broken Nose.

CLAUDEL. Rodin employed various assistants throughout his career. One of them, Camille Claudel (1864-1943), has emerged as an important artist in her own right. Claudel entered Rodin's studio as a nineteen-year-old and was for many years his collaborator and mistress. Her sculptures are stylistically akin to Rodin's; some of her strongest pieces might be mistaken for his. However, Claudel's lyrical sensi­bility, which contrasts with Rodin's confident sense of the heroic, is a distinctive hallmark of her work, the subject matter of which is often autobiographical. Ripe Age was begun at the time when she was being replaced in Rodin's affections by another woman, his long-time com­panion Rose Beuret. It shows Rodin, whose features are clearly recognizable, being led away with apparent reluc­tance by the other woman, who is portrayed as a sinister, shrouded figure. Claudel adapted this figure from an earlier work showing Clotho, one of the three Fates, ironically caught in the web of life she had woven for herself. The nude figure on the right is a self-portrait of the pleading Claudel; this figure, too, evolved from an earlier work, Entreaty.