20 THE ART NEWSPAPER SECTION 2 Number 284, November 2016
Books Reviews
The archaic
torso lesson
You Must Change Your Life: the
Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and
Auguste Rodin
Rachel Corbett
W.W. Norton and Company, 320pp,
$26.95 (hb)SCULPTURE
T
he relationship between
Rodin and Rilke is an
exceptionally intriguing
conjunction between
two artists—a sculptor
and a poet—working in
radically diferent media. It was not
a relationship of equals. When they
first met, on 1 September 1902, Rilke
was still an obscure, unsuccessful
writer. His first major volume of
poetry, the Book of Hours, was partly
written but would not appear till- Meanwhile, he had a wife and
infant daughter to support. Since for
him taking a regular job was not an
option, he was living by occasional
journalism and publishers’
commissions. Rodin, 35 years older,
had after many years of struggle,
rejection and unpopularity attained
such fame that at the Paris World’s
Fair in 1900 the authorities allowed
him to display his sculptures in his
own pavilion, provided he paid for
it himself.
Commissioned to write a
monograph on Rodin, Rilke secured
an introduction through his wife,
Clara Westhof, who had been among
the first students at the Institut
Rodin in Paris. Lengthy conversations
with Rodin led to the monograph,
published in 1903 and reprinted
several times with additions. Despite
its awestruck tone, it is a fine
appreciation of Rodin’s work. No
doubt it helped to encourage Rodin,
in September 1905, to ofer Rilke a
post as his personal secretary.
Rilke handled Rodin’s extensive
correspondence with enthusiasm,
polishing his French in the
process. But Rodin was notoriously
unpredictable. In April 1906 he
flew into a rage on finding that
Rilke had written a (perfectly
innocuous) personal letter to William
Rothenstein, one of Rodin’s London
patrons. Rilke was humiliatingly
dismissed. Rachel Corbett relates this
experience, in You Must Change Your
Life, to Rilke’s poem The Departure
of the Prodigal Son, written in June
1906; if so, the poem’s last line
(“Is this the beginning of a new
life?”) testifies to Rilke’s resilience.
Fortunately their estrangement lasted
little more than a year, ending with a
conciliatory letter from Rodin.
So how did Rilke’s acquaintance
with Rodin change his life? Thephrase that supplies Corbett’s title
comes from Rilke’s Archaic Torso
of Apollo, which opens New Poems,
Part Two (1908), a collection dedicated
to Rodin. To answer this question,
the most revealing document is
Rilke’s letter of 8 August 1903 to his
former lover Lou Andreas-Salomé.
In it, Rilke first praises Rodin for his
organic strength, groundedness and
self-suiciency: “O what a solitary
being is this old man, who, immersed
in himself, stands full of sap like an
ancient tree in autumn.” Then he
describes Rodin’s creations as artistic
objects: “The thing is definite, the
art-thing must be still more definite:
removed from all chance, remote
from all unclarity, withdrawn from
time and given to space, it has
become lasting, fit for eternity.” For
a poem to become what Corbett calls
a “sculpturally composed work”, it
had to be self-contained with a clear
internal structure, as in the sonnet
form, which Rilke often uses in both
volumes of New Poems.
But there is another element,
which Corbett interestingly explores:
empathy. Having attended lectures at
Munich University by the aesthetician
Theodor Lipps, Rilke knew the theory
of empathy or Einfühlung, “feeling
one’s way into” another being.
But the practice of empathy was
dangerous for someone so sensitive.
Other people’s feelings, as with the
suferer from Tourette’s syndrome
whom Rilke followed compulsively
through the Paris streets one day,could invade his emotional space and
cause him acute anxiety.
Rodin’s sculptures could explore
the essential nature of their object,
as with the monstrous Balzac
memorial (commissioned in 1891,
completed and rejected in 1898,
publicly displayed only in 1939). Rilke
felt his way into the essential being,
first of animals, then of things. In his
poems, animals and statues—even,
paradoxically, the torso of Apollo—
gaze back at the beholder; but
empathy is controlled, and kept from
invasiveness, by the sonnet form.
Corbett’s book is engagingly
written. She has a gift for short, well-
composed sentences, which carry the
reader along, although the copy-editor
has failed to notice that some French
expressions are misspelled or garbled.
Her book is essentially two
parallel biographies, leading up to
and away from the period when
both lives intersected, with much
enjoyable information about artistic
life in 1900s Paris. It can be warmly
recommended to the general reader,
who may well be inspired to visit the
Musée Rodin or to read Rilke’s early
Letters to a Young Poet, a work from
his Rodin period to which Corbett
pays an attractive personal tribute.- Ritchie Robertson is a professor of
German at the University of Oxford. His
most recent book is Goethe: a Very Short
Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2016)
Rainer Maria Rilke (left) with Auguste
Rodin in Paris in the 1900sBut where is Tracey the Tory?
This history of the YBAs and Britart is long on anecdote but short on critical insight. By Robert Garnett
world it displaced, as one of the
many anecdotes reminds us, an art
world reminiscent of a “discreet and
exclusive gentleman’s club” that left
younger artists “wondering how long
they’d have to wait until Howard
Hodgkin died” before they had a
chance of a look-in. London became
genuinely exciting in the 1990s
because it ofered new opportunities
for young artists (who were able to
take advantage of them): cheap rents
for studios and flats, a new, expanded
class-profile in the art world and a
host of new artist-run spaces to show
new work.
For a while, it was, in fact, in these
independent spaces where all the
action was perceived to be happening.
Today, nothing could be further from
the case. Artrage!, with its wealth
of reminiscences, is quite good on
this, but without any proper critical
contextualisation it ends up being
too repetitive of the long evaporated
mythology that built up around the
DIY dimension of the YBAs.
One story it curiously omits to
mention is Emin’s broadcast in 2010
of her pride at having voted Tory in
that year’s election. Another is how
a neon piece of hers took pride of
place for David Cameron on a landing
at the top of the main staircase at
10 Downing Street.- Robert Garnett is a London-based writer
and critic, and a lecturer in art and art
theory at the University of Reading. He is
currently completing a book on humour
versus irony in art since the 1980s
CONTEMPORARY ART
F
or anyone who was
around on the London
art scene in the late
1980s and early 1990s,
reading this book is a bit
like being in an uncanny
time warp. Artrage! is a forensically
detailed recounting of the rise to fame
of the artists who were part of what
Elizabeth Fullerton refers to as the
“BritArt Revolution”. On the way, we
are reacquainted not just with the
leading lights of the “YBAs”, such as
Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin and Sarah
Lucas, but also with a host of names
once uttered in the same breath as
the post-Freeze generation, but who
have long since fallen into obscurity.
Readable as the book is—it is based
on anecdotes and gossip culled from
hundreds of hours of interviews—its
main problem is that it comes across
as if nothing much has happened in
the 25 years or more since then.
Nowadays it is not easy to say
“YBA” or “Britart” without a tinge
of embarrassment, such has the
critical stock of its protagonists
plummeted. A few, including Lucas
and the Chapman Brothers, continue
to thrive, but Hirst and Emin have
become virtually unmentionable to ayounger generation of London-based
artists, who see them as synonymous
with the bloated, narcissistic excesses
of what the art world has turned into
since the 1990s. Today, Britart has
about as much critical credibility as
Blairism and Britpop. Unfortunately,
Artrage! has next to nothing
substantive to say about this.
Nor does failing to provide any
detailed critical analysis of individual
works do the artists here any great
favours, since more than a few works
made in London at the time still stand
up. Hirst’s shark piece (1991), and
his A Thousand Years, life-and-death-
cycle machine (1990), along with the
Medicine Cabinets series (1988-2012)
testify to his uncanny capacity, at the
time, to be able to transform objects
into stunning 3D images. The same
goes for Lucas’s Two Fried Eggs and
a Kebab (1992) and Au Naturel (1994),
and Jake and Dinos Chapman’s
Chapmanworld-period work.
These works certainly represented
a departure from the predominantly
New York, October-theory-ledNewspeak into which much late-
postmodern art and commentary had
descended by the early 1990s; a new,
much more humorous intelligence
had come to challenge the dry irony
of the endgamisms of the 1980s and
early 1990s. For the first five years of
his career, Hirst was still very much
part of this, but then ascended into
the new international asset-class art-
world stratosphere that has emerged
since the 1990s.
Devoid of any proper art-critical
work, Artrage! leaves us unable to
distinguish the early Hirst from the
later one, and the same goes for
trying to disentangle the few quality
YBA works from the vast majority of
kitsch that the scene can be seen in
hindsight to have generated. All this
testifies to the cogency of art historian
and critic Hal Foster when he stated:
“History without critique is inert,
criticism without history is aimless.”
Another vital dimension of
the YBA scene is in need of timely
reappraisal: the way it stands as a
kind of anti-monument to an artArtrage! The Story of the
BritArt Revolution
Elizabeth Fullerton
Thames & Hudson, 288pp, £24.95 (hb)Rainer Maria Rilke’s apprenticeship under
Auguste Rodin. By Ritchie Robertson
MEDIEVAL ART
For many, the temptation to look,
unobserved, into other people’s houses
is irresistible. Medieval and Renaissance
Interiors in Illuminated Manuscripts
allows readers to indulge that enthusiasm
historically. Designed as an introduction to
domestic interiors (mainly of high status)
from the 14th to the 16th century, the book’s
informative illustrations are selected from
illuminated manuscripts, with an emphasis
on Flemish and French material. Captions
are admirably full in terms of commentary
and pressmark, date and folio references—
scholarly information all too often omitted
or relegated to the back of a volume.
Illustrations from British Library
manuscripts predominate, many of them
well known, but a number of unfamiliar
delights show the wonders of early
16th-century Polish manuscript illumination.
A mural painter, in hat and loose-fitting
shift, sits on a chest balanced upon a table,
hard at work in a secular interior in the
Kraków Statutes of the Painters (Biblioteka
Jagiellorìska MS 16). An initial from the
Pontifical Erazma Ciolka (Princes Czartoryski
Foundation, RKPS 1212) shows the Birth of
the Virgin in a comfortable ground-floor
room with tiled floor and barred windows,
furnished with a sturdy wooden bed, cradle,
wall cupboard and a table and chest set with
fine metalwork vessels.
The persistent lack of specific room
functions in the period dictates the structure
of the text. The opening chapters focus on
the materials and designs associated with
elements of the architectural shell—doors
and windows, walls, floors and ceilings—
followed by chapters on the furniture and
fittings necessary to provide warm, light
and hygienic living and sleeping spaces. A
final section explores conspicuous displays
of wealth associated with luxury dining, and
rooms used by the most auent of patrons
as studies or “treasuries”.
The relatively scanty survival of wall
and panel paintings that depict Gothic and
Renaissance domestic interiors justifies
illuminated manuscripts as the source for
illustrations, but to what extent can they
be trusted? Do they always reflect material
reality? Since most manuscript painting is
small-scale, precise interpretation is often
diicult, and artistic licence has surely been
at work in some instances. No extant artefact
indicates that the elaborate metal fountain
depicted in the God of Love’s garden in
Engelbert of Nassau’s late 15th-century
Roman de la Rose (British Library, Harley MS
4425) is anything other than a construct of
the illuminator’s imagination.
Where surviving evidence allows, useful
extant comparative examples are cited that
are contemporary with those depicted in the
manuscripts. These suggest that much can
be taken at face value, but no comparative
material is illustrated, thereby depriving the
reader of useful corroborative assurance.
Certain details could also be more rigorously
interpreted in relation to extant objects;
the transparent covered-cup, in the early
16th-century Grimani Breviary feasting
scene (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana cod.
lat. I, 99), is more likely to have been made
from rock crystal than glass. Occasionally
comparative evidence is cited inaccurately—
the Sistine Chapel tapestries based on
Raphael’s cartoons are not lost; they survive
in the Vatican Museum and other weavings.
And some recurrent manuscript evidence
begs explanation. Why were high-status bed
hangings and covers so often depicted in
glorious scarlet? Answer: to tell viewers that
the owner of the bed could aford the most
expensive dye-stufs.
All that said, this handsome volume
sheds much needed light on late Medieval
and Renaissance interiors for the general
reader, and should promote further scholarly
interest in this field.- Sally Dormer is an independent Medieval art
historian. She is the director of the Victoria and
Albert Museum’s Early Medieval Year course
Medieval and Renaissance Interiors
in Illuminated Manuscripts
Eva Oledzka
British Library Publishing, 160pp, £25 (hb)Ideal or real?
Manuscript illuminations are
problematic as illustrations
of Medieval and Renaissance
interiors. By Sally Dormer
Darling of the
Establishment:
Tracey Emin
installed her neon
More Passion
(2010) in 10
Downing Street,
having created it at
the request of then
prime minister
David CameronRILKE/RODIN: MUSÉE RODIN. EMIN: © THE ARTIST/DACS; COURTESY OF LEHMANN MAUPIN