النحت .. كتاب الفن في القرن العشرين

sculpture

The development that distanced photography from realism at the end of the last century has also appeared in sculpture. However, the number of his pioneers is not large. If we exclude Degas and Gauguin, given that their contributions in this field are not simple, there remains only one sculptor who gave us valuable production in terms of strength and innovation. It is Rodin, although his production is not entirely new. Frodan admires By «Mikel Ang», who is the inheritor of Baroque and Romanticism, he never attacks literature, nor is he indifferent to psychology. If he likes “Eve” or “the bourgeois of Calais,” then the subject has a weight that does not exist in “Renoir” or “Cézanne” and even in “Gauguin.” . In the last analysis, "Rodin" distances his subjects from academic sculpture less than he distances himself from the depth of his feelings and the vitality of his forms.

Rodin appears first as an anthropomorphic, as a man who likes to knead clay, moving the surface of his volumes with multiple terrains in order to create a kinetic game of lights. In general, Rodin is less impressionistic than what is sometimes said about him. To be convinced of this, it is sufficient to compare his bronze sculptures with those made by (Degas): No matter how unpredictable the positions of the dancers and horses are in the production of the latter, and no matter how clear the artist's goal is to make the body a group of volumes that oppose each other in an unstable balance, the important thing remains in Physical composition and respectable joints. While Rodin, in his production of dancers in his late life, seems to want to represent the idea of ​​soft and homogeneous movements more than his representation of moving bodies.

In any case, since he went beyond the realism that he embraced at the beginning of his work, the dreamer tends to excel the observer, and when he achieves this without reservation, we notice the birth of his most expressive effects, and nothing proves this more than the creation of the “Balzac” statue. After wanting to suggest the power of the writer through the strong physique of a naked peasant, Rodin decided to cover the body under a loose dress, and the more this garment turns into a rugged, jagged rock, the more simple and demonic the face becomes, and in one word, the more the artist succeeds in removing every common denominator. Between the creator of the human comedy and the ordinary man, as far as he reaches to make us feel the realistic truth of the inexhaustible novelist.

Gauguin, in his sculpted statues, reflects the same spirit that prevails in his paintings, except that the first shows the barbaric side, and the bumps that he cools in the wood give a harshness that is missing in his paintings. In addition to the primitive character of his statues, he gives them a simple sobriety that Western art had lost centuries ago, and many artists sought after him to recover it.