Working the Room. Geoff Dyer
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could enable people ‘to discover qualities in a work of art that might not be immediately apparent even to a knowledgeable and critical viewer’. Finn also suggests that whereas photographs of complete sculptures often reveal stylistic traits or conventions which date the work and distract the viewer, photos like his (which, typically, isolate parts of a larger whole) reveal what is elemental, timeless. By doing so, by freeing them from the grip of convention and the period in which they were made, the stones are brought to life.
When it comes to photographing the works of Rodin this strategy is both appropriate and, in a sense, superfluous, because the sculptor himself often concentrated on parts of the body. If the fragment is, as Linda Nochlin suggests, ‘a metaphor of modernity’, then Rodin’s eagerness to exhibit dismembered body parts as completed works of art is one of the ways in which the twentieth century can be felt beckoning in the nineteenth. This is not the only congruity between photography and Rodin’s working methods.
In her contentious essay ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’, Rosalind Krauss points out that, like Cartier-Bresson, ‘who never printed his own photographs, Rodin’s relation to the casting of his own sculpture could only be called remote’. The fact that the plasters are themselves casts – i.e. ‘potential multiples’ – illustrates how deeply Rodin’s method was steeped ‘in the ethos of mechanical reproduction’. The same figures recur endlessly, in new contexts, in new permutations, in new arrangements, in new sizes, in new materials. Many of these figures were first glimpsed in the molten swirl of The Gates of Hell (which Rodin referred to as his ‘Noah’s ark’); since the monument was never cast in the sculptor’s lifetime – and thus, in a sense, never completed – Krauss views Rodin’s as ‘an art of reproduction, of multiples without originals’.
Needless to say, any equation of his art with the camera’s capacity for copying or passive recording would have enraged Rodin in the same way that allegations that his Age of Bronze was cast from life had done in 1877: ‘Many cast from nature, that is to say, replace an art work with a photograph. It is quick but it is not art.’ Resolutely insisting that ‘it is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies’, Rodin made clear his distaste for photography on many occasions. He was scarcely less obstinate in his aversions as an observer than he was as creator:
Photographs of monuments are mute for me. They do not move me; they allow me to see nothing. Because they do not properly reproduce the planes, photographs are for me always of an unendurable dryness and hardness. The lens of the camera, like the eye, sees in low relief. Whereas, looking at these stones, I feel them! My gaze touches them everywhere as I move about to see from all sides how they soar in every direction under the heaven and from all sides I search out their secret.
In spite of these specific and generalised objections Rodin, especially from the mid-1890s onwards, took advantage of the full range of opportunities afforded by photography. He used photos as tools to revise and edit his works in progress, indicating in pen changes to be made later to the figures themselves. He included photographs of his sculptures in exhibitions. Alert to their value in making his work available in another, easily disseminated form, he used photographs to publicise, enhance and spread his reputation, to help the idea of his matchless originality to proliferate. After seeing the Rodin exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1986, Anthony Barnett even went so far as to suggest not only that ‘the photographic images may often have a stronger presence than the actual works’, but that Rodin ‘may often have consciously sought for an effect that was aimed at the two-dimensional mass-reproduction of his work, rather than its three-dimensional solitude’.
Rodin did not take photographs himself, preferring to rely on the skills of a small but changing group of skilled and trusted collaborators. The most important of these was Edward Steichen, who achieved in photography the equivalent of what Rilke managed in prose: a supremely individualised account in which the work and the man who made it were perfectly mirrored. Steichen’s composite image of Rodin silhouetted in front of The Thinker and the Monument to Victor Hugo (1902) and the brooding long exposures of the Balzac monument at night (1908) captured the sculptor’s imagination in a way that he had not previously believed possible. In person Rodin was, by all accounts, a modest man; at the deepest level, though, the test of photography – its greatest challenge, in fact – was whether it could do justice to his genius. On seeing Steichen’s Balzac prints Rodin was immediately convinced, informing him that he would ‘make the world understand my Balzac through these pictures. They are like Christ walking in the desert.’ Rodin’s enthusiasm for Steichen – ‘Before him nothing conclusive had been achieved’ – was such that it caused him profoundly to re-consider the value of photography, which, he conceded in 1908, ‘can create works of art’. The collaboration was mutually beneficial to sculptor and photographer alike. Of the portrait of Rodin and The Thinker, Steichen recalled that it was ‘undoubtedly the image that launched me in the photographic world’.
I approached Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s photographs not with Rodin’s magisterial scepticism but with a degree of impatience. There were other things I was supposed to be doing, other things I was meant to be looking at, and I hoped that they would not detain me, that I could look at them quickly. These hopes were accurate and wide of the mark in that it took only a brief look for any desire to move on to be immediately extinguished. Although I didn’t realise it at the time the reason for this was, perhaps, that these pictures had brought me so close to the source, to Rodin himself. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Rilke had been dazzled by the snow-bright whiteness of Rodin’s work; Gough-Cooper subtly reminds us that white is itself a colour, endlessly susceptible to changes of angle and light. At times it can even seem – how else to put it? – flesh-coloured.
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