ing eye-level in the city center and preparing eternally
to set off on their sacrificial journey. However, the city
officials who commissioned the group found Rodin’s
Realist vision so offensive that they banished the monu-
ment to a remote site and modified the work’s impact
by placing it high on an isolating pedestal.
Rodin’s ability to capture the quality of the transi-
tory through his highly textured surfaces while revealing
larger themes and deeper, lasting sensibilities is one of
the reasons he had a strong influence on 20th-century
artists. Because many of his works, such as Walking Man,
were deliberate fragments, he was also instrumental in
creating a taste for the incomplete, an aesthetic that
many later sculptors embraced enthusiastically.P
hotography had a profound effect on 19th-century art, and many
artists used photographs as an aid in capturing “reality” on can-
vas or in stone. Eadweard Muybridge’s photographs of a galloping
horse (FIG. 30-54), for example, definitively established that at certain
times all four hooves of the animal are in the air. But not all artists be-
lieved that photography was “true to life.” The sculptor Auguste Rodin
(FIGS. 31-32and 31-33) was one of the “doubters.”
I have always sought to give some indication of movement [in my
statues]. I have very rarely represented complete repose. I have always
endeavoured to express the inner feelings by the mobility of the mus-
cles....The illusion of life is obtained in our art by good modelling
and by movement....[M]ovement is the transition from one atti-
tude to another....Have you ever attentively examined instanta-
neous photographs of walking figures?... [Photographs] present the
odd appearance of a man suddenly stricken with paralysis and petri-
fied in his pose....If,in fact,in instantaneous photographs, the fig-
ures, though taken while moving, seem suddenly fixed in mid-air, it
is because, all parts of the body being reproduced exactly at the same
twentieth or fortieth of a second, there is no progressive development
ofmovement as there is in art....[I]t is the artist who is truthful and
it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop.*
* Translated by Robin Fedden, in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed.,From the Classicists
to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the 19th Century(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1966; reprint 1986), 406–409.Rodin on Movement in Art and Photography
ARTISTS ON ART31-32Auguste Rodin,Walking Man,1905. Bronze, 6 113 – 4 high.
Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
In this study for a statue of Saint John the Baptist, Rodin depicted a
headless and armless figure in mid-stride. Walking Mandemonstrates
Rodin’s mastery of anatomy and his ability to capture transitory motion.31-33Auguste Rodin,Burghers of Calais,1884–1889.
Bronze, 6 101 – 2 high, 7 11 long, 6 6 deep. Musée Rodin,
Paris.
Rodin’s bronze group commemorates an episode during
the Hundred Years’ War, when six Calais citizens offered
their lives to save their city. Each highly textured figure
is a convincing character study.Sculpture 8451 ft.
1 ft.