CHAPTER XIV
THE MODERN FRENCH SCHOOL
(AFTER 1848)
We are now approaching the end of our task. It only remains to gather together the various strands of our argument, with a view to the solution of the final problem—the position of sculpture in our own times. Though we shall first deal with the art of France and then turn to that of England, the sequence of events will be found to be practically the same in both countries. A single super-title—“The Renascence of Individualism”—might properly characterize both chapters.
Speaking roughly, the pseudo-Hellenic style of Canova and his followers persisted until the middle of the nineteenth century. So long as it lasted, the sculptor chose to fit his thoughts and emotions into an entirely alien form. It was a form of his own choosing, it is true, but it could scarcely be said to be of his own making.
Now, we have seen again and again, that the production of vital sculpture, whether by the nation or the individual, depends upon absolute sincerity. It must spring from the deep-felt emotions of the artist. The class of work—portraiture or what not—matters little. The subject matters even less. What is all-important is that the design in which the sculptor seeks to embody his ideas shall grow spontaneously from his experience in the world of Nature. Apart from that—n’importe!
“There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And-every-single-one-of-them-is-right.”
But the adoption of an alien form was not the only obstacle to a revival of sculpture. During the greater part of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the prevailing philosophy had condemned the intellectuals of Western Europe to the suppression of all natural passion and emotion. A cataclysm like the French Revolution was necessary to regain for mankind the right to feel. Once this right had been asserted, the results were immediate. At first, individualism took a political form. Napoleon arose—the incarnation of the Frenchman’s desire to impress his newly discovered social ideas upon the civilized world. When the Emperor fell in 1815, the passion for individual expression took artistic shape. What Napoleon did in the world of politics, Shelley and Victor Hugo, Delacroix and Turner did in the world of art. Romance in action became Romance in imagination. Criticism, which had been academic, became individual; thought became profoundly subjective. The philosopher was no longer content with a few abstractions and an elaborate terminology; he sought to know the import of the broad earth and the still broader heaven. These were times
“In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways Of custom, law, and statute, took at once The attraction of a country in romance.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very Heaven.”
ANTOINE BARYE
LAPITH AND CENTAUR
Louvre, Paris
Numberless emotions and ideas, glowing with a strange and unearthly light presented themselves for artistic expression—emotions and ideas which art had entirely lost sight of during the previous century and a half.
It is, therefore, evident that the effects of the Romantic Movement upon sculpture call for immediate definition by all who seek to formulate the circumstance which led to the modern revival.
We propose to start with France. In spite of the strong lead which Rude gave his fellows, the whole body of French sculptors were slow to realize the importance of the new vistas of experience opening before them. A few, David d’Angers for instance, expressed a measure of the revolutionary spirit in their art. But, in the main, the elegant grace of a philo-Hellene like Pradier was appreciated above the vigorous naturalism of Rude and David. It was not until the genius of Barye and Carpeaux forced itself upon the public notice that a definite step forward was made.
Of the two, Antoine Barye (1795-1875) was the first in point of time, though the second in point of influence. In many ways, however, Barye marks, more clearly than Carpeaux himself, the gulf separating the typically modern school from that which contented itself with ringing the changes upon an endless series of mythological abstractions.
Barye was first and foremost a sculptor of wild animals. The famous exhibit in the Salon of 1831, which first brought him into notice, could only have been modelled by one who knew the anatomy of the beasts of the forest as completely as the Greeks knew the human form. The group represented a death struggle between a crocodile and a tiger. Barye showed the crocodile clutching, in mortal agony, at the neck of the tiger. The tiger, with gleaming eyes, bites fiercely into its enemy’s body.
When we compare such a subject with the Venuses and Apollos with which his fellows concerned themselves, Barye’s connection with the Romanticists is at once evident. The pith and marrow of Romanticism is a distrust of the commonplace and a longing to bring new worlds of experience within the ken of the artist. Take a few of the leaders of the Romantic Movement at random. In literature, Scott, Byron, Heine, and Victor Hugo. In painting, Gericault, Turner, and Delacroix. One and all sought to arouse the world from a state of contentment which Ruskin adroitly illustrated by the image of the happiness of the squirrel in his circular prison. The end of their endeavour was to extend the sphere of art beyond the graceful, the fanciful, and the commonplace.
But the mere discovery of a fresh field for the sculptor is only a part of the debt which we moderns owe to Barye. His supreme gift lay in his power to treat the new subjects without ever transgressing the limits set by his medium. “A genius in his conception of art and by his power of expressing it,” is the verdict of his pupil, Rodin. The truth of this can be seen at once in any of Barye’s famous works—the “Lion” in the courtyard of the Louvre, for instance, or the brilliant “[Centaur and Lapith],” in the same collection. Nothing to be compared with them as studies in animal life, had been given to the world since the days of the Assyrian sculptors, who worked with the knowledge that only a race of hunters can possess.
Barye’s supreme skill in his own sphere militated against his influence ever becoming as general as it deserved. As a rule he confined himself to small works. In the nature of things, he could not expect the numerous commissions which an equally gifted craftsman with a larger range of subject would have secured. Hence, though Barye must be recognized as one of the pioneers of Romanticism in his art, only a pedant can regard him as the father of modern French sculpture. This position belongs to Carpeaux.
Born in 1827, Jean Baptiste Carpeaux started his career under the most favourable circumstances. He was a pupil of Rude. Not only did he inherit the technical skill of his master, but he carried away something of the fine human sympathy which characterized the great sculptor of the Revolutionary period. Carpeaux was wont to say that he “never passed Rude’s ‘Chant du Départ’ without raising his hat.” Winning the Prix de Rome in 1854, Carpeaux proved that a new force had arisen in French sculpture when he exhibited his “Neapolitan Fisher Lad” in 1858, a work which strongly recalls Rude’s very similar study. Carpeaux’s full power was revealed three years later, when he finished his famous group of “Ugolino and his Sons,” now in the Louvre at Paris.
Perhaps no work contains more of the spirit of Carpeaux than the delightful high relief, “Flora.” It comes from the Pavilion of Flora, in the Palace of the Tuileries. The very conventionality of the subject emphasizes the originality of Carpeaux’s treatment. The Goddess of the Spring is surrounded by a band of dimpled putti, dancing attendance upon her. Whether we like it or whether we do not, we recognize that the relief strikes an individual note. It owes nothing to philo-Hellenism. Carpeaux has treated the subject in a particular manner for one reason only—that is how he saw and felt it.
An equally good example of Carpeaux at his best is furnished by the famous group, “[The Dance],” on the façade of the Opera House in Paris. When it was unveiled in 1869, “[The Dance]” was greeted with a storm of angry protest. Small wonder. What we have come to regard as the great charm of the group—the insistence upon the joy of motion—must have seemed sheer impertinence to an age which regarded a graceful calm as the one end of sculpture. No doubt, Carpeaux’s critics really believed that, in “[The Dance],” Genius, in truth, danced a bacchanal; in their view, he crowned
“The brimming goblet, seized the thyrsus, bound His brows with ivy, rushed into the field Of wild imagination and there reeled, The victim of his own lascivious fires, And, dizzy with delight, profaned the sacred wires.”
The saner judgment of to-day sees that Carpeaux resolved for his generation one of the ultimate difficulties of his art. He showed how marble might be robbed of its specific gravity. In “[The Dance]” it leaps. The sculptor has deprived stone of its essential deadness. His figures live.
J. B. CARPEAUX
THE DANCE
From the Opera House, Paris
THE ACADEMIC SCULPTORS
The technical tradition established by Carpeaux has never been lost. To this day, France boasts of a band of sculptors who can make marble “dance” and “live,” as surely as Carpeaux himself. In this respect, the French school is far better endowed than the English. The technical superiority is, in great measure, traceable to the École des Beaux Arts. Before we embark upon the inevitable criticism, let us render our meed of praise.
The École des Beaux Arts was founded as far back as 1648. It is open to Frenchmen of all classes, entrance being by an examination consisting of modelling in clay from “the life.” The test occupies two hours daily for a week—twelve hours in all. The aim of every sculptor at the École des Beaux Arts is the Prix de Rome, which has been held by most of the famous French Masters and brings with it the very tangible advantage of a four years’ residence in Italy at the Government’s expense. The school employs a large staff of highly gifted professors and provides technical instruction which is worthy of all praise. Few men of talent leave its walls without, at any rate, knowing how to model and what sculptural design actually means.
Unfortunately the École des Beaux Arts does not escape the fault of all academies. Its system reduces the chance of failure to a minimum, but it does nothing to increase the proportion of supreme successes. The insistence upon tradition which is inseparable from academic teaching, seems to prevent those who accept its methods from ever expressing their full individuality. To find what is most vital in French sculpture one has therefore to look beyond the ranks of those who have been trained in the École des Beaux Arts. Nevertheless, no record of modern French art would be complete without some reference to the sculptures to be seen in every salon, which clearly owe their finest qualities to the teaching of that school.
The task of selecting two or three typical examples is an invidious one. The general level of sculptural achievement in France is so high, and the sculptors who claim inclusion in the first rank are so numerous, that it is almost impossible to single out one man without remembering that another has at least an equal claim to notice. Bearing this proviso in mind, few will be found to object to the inclusion of Antoine Idrac. No finer choice can be made than his beautiful “[Mercury inventing the Caduceus]” in the Luxembourg collection at Paris. Graceful, suave, restrained, it shows French academic art at its very best.
Another instructive instance can be found among the works of Paul Dubois (born 1829), a sculptor with rather less of the Greek and a little more of the fervid Italian in his temperament. His most famous work is the monument to General de la Moricière in the Cathedral at Nantes, but Dubois’ art is equally well represented by the charming “St. John”—in the Luxembourg. The early date of this work—it was modelled during the sculptor’s stay in Florence in 1860—perhaps saves it from an accusation which may be levelled against the greater portion of the sculpture of the academic school. Too often, its only fault is its faultlessness. For a time the senses are satisfied, but after a second and third visit we come
“To loathe the taste of sweetness, whereof a little More than a little is by much too much.”
In connection with this phase of modern French art, reference must be made to the work of Falguière. Apart from its intrinsic merit, Falguière’s influence among the younger French sculptors is enormous. The wonderful facility in modelling which is so common in France is in large measure due to his teaching and example.
DUBOIS
SAINT JOHN
Luxembourg, Paris
IDRAC
MERCURY INVENTING THE CADUCEUS
Luxembourg, Paris
From these illustrations it will be plain that the whole of the French academical school inclines to sacrifice too much to the graces. Aided by an almost perfect technique, its masters have little difficulty in securing their one aim—abstract beauty. But they fail to avoid showing in their marbles and bronzes a marked lifelessness obviously due to the adoption of a foreign convention. In these days, the French sculptor does not follow Canova. He forms his style upon semi-Italian, semi-Greek lines, laid down by an entity—the École des Beaux Arts.
For this reason, it is no coincidence that the two foremost sculptors in France not only failed to gain anything from the École des Beaux Arts, but can actually trace their supreme position to this very fact. Jules Dalou succeeded in securing admission to the École’s classes, but agreed that “in the end they did him no good.” Rodin actually sat for the entrance examination three times. On each occasion he failed to persuade the authorities that his talent was worth fostering. Had the École des Beaux Arts succeeded in dragging these two men into their all-enfolding net, the world would certainly be the poorer by the very qualities which give the sculpture of Dalou and Rodin its unique value.
Of the two, Jules Dalou approaches most closely to the academic ideal. He is the link between the École des Beaux Arts and Rodin. The coupling of the two names must not be taken to suggest any close similarity between the two men. In his general view of the world, Dalou is far more akin to his master, Carpeaux, than he is to Rodin. The historical connection between Dalou and his more famous contemporary arises from the evidence of a revolt against the high conventionalism of the academic school to be found in his work. Moreover, like Rodin’s, Dalou’s figures never suggest the model; on the contrary, they are utterly unlike those of the “realists,” who also oppose the teachings of the École des Beaux Arts. This can be seen in such a work as Dalou’s great group—“[The Triumph of Silenus],” in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The statue has the exuberant strength, the irresistible gusto for the living flesh, of a Rubens painting.
Dalou’s sculpture has a peculiar interest for Englishmen. He is perhaps better known in England than any other French sculptor. He had to fly from Paris after the Commune, owing to having accepted the Curatorship of the Louvre during the troublous times. In the course of his eight years exile in England, he became professor of sculpture at South Kensington. Dalou was, throughout his career, a man of strenuous purpose, able and willing to drive home the ideals which he had made his own. It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of his instruction and example upon the younger school of English sculptors.
JULES DALOU
TRIUMPH OF SILENUS
Jardin du Luxembourg, Paris
AUGUSTE RODIN
Rodin—Dalou’s comrade in the fight against the influence of the École des Beaux Arts—is a man of equally vigorous personality. Even more than Dalou, he has come to his own in spite of circumstances. Born in 1840, Rodin is now sixty-seven years of age. At fourteen, he started to earn a living as a maker of ornaments, managing, however, to find time for classes at a Parisian art school and lessons from the veteran Barye. Little trace can now be found of the influence of the great animal sculptor upon his more famous pupil, but Rodin has put on record his indebtedness to Barye.
“It was he,” he said, “who, by fixing my attention upon Nature, carried my artistic education to a point from which I could pursue it alone.”
Truth to tell, Rodin owes his success to no one except himself. He is essentially the sculptor of modern individualism in its most intense form.
A few years later Rodin engaged himself as a workman in the studio of the fashionable sculptor, Carrier-Belleuse, prior to emigrating to Brussels, as assistant to the Belgium sculptor, Van Rasbourg. Thirteen years were spent in these employments. It was not until Rodin returned to Paris, aged thirty-one, that his career as an independent sculptor commenced. In 1877, he sent the famous male nude, “The Age of Brass,” to the Salon. The story of its reception is well known. The jury, astonished at its realism, admitted the works. But so perfect did they consider its modelling, that they refused to believe that the sculptor had not taken a cast from the life. Fortunately, a friend was at hand—M. Turquet, of the Ministry of Fine Arts—who secured the statue for the Luxembourg collection. The struggle continued until 1880, when officialdom finally decided to approve the purchase of the “Age of Brass” and withdrew an entirely unjustifiable charge. In the same year, the State purchased the “[St. John Baptist],” a fine bronze replica of which can be seen at South Kensington Museum.
At the age of forty, when many men have abandoned all hope, Rodin found the path to fame open. The long struggle over the “Age of Brass” had brought notoriety, no small matter in an age of advertisement. Events soon proved that it had done much more. A dogmatic revolutionary like Rodin only required to realize how utterly his ideals clashed with those of his rivals to cling to them with fourfold energy. The treble rejection by the École des Beaux Arts and the cruel struggle with the Salon Jury turned a sculptor who would only have been a mediocre academician into a reactionary of genius.
Rodin’s reputation as a fighter has led many to believe that his work is essentially uncouth. His technical powers matured slowly, but to-day no French sculptor is more richly endowed. When he pleases, Rodin can render, say, the velvety softness of a woman’s flesh with an ease and delicate grace that any sculptor might envy. A beautiful example of this side of Rodin’s genius is furnished by the “Fallen Danaid” (1888).
The girl has fallen, in a paroxysm of grief, on a rocky stretch—the very roughness of the setting offering a beautiful contrast to the soft modelling of the limbs. The face is half buried. The dishevelled hair trails amid the broken fragments of the water jar. As we said of Carpeaux’s “Flora,” the “Danaid” is a subject which might occupy the chisel of the most academic sculptor. But there is not a suggestion of an earlier imagination in Rodin’s rendering. He has simply felt the thing afresh and expressed himself in the manner which seemed most suitable.
The “Danaid” represents one side of Rodin’s genius, but perhaps the life-work of the sculptor can be most readily appreciated from some account of the mysterious “Gate of Hell,” which looms so largely in all biographical notices of the sculptor.
The commission for the “Gate of Hell” (the Porte de l’Enfer) dates from 1880, and was a direct consequence of the settlement of the controversy which arose out of the “Age of Brass.” The original idea was to provide an entrance to the projected Musée des Arts Décoratifs, which, if it did not vie with, would at least recall Lorenzo Ghiberti’s “[Gate of Paradise],” in the Baptistery at Florence. The original site for the Musée in the Cour des Comptes has, however, since been utilized for a railway station, and the French Government has, accordingly, never required the completion of its contract. For twenty-seven years the “Gate of Hell” has stood in Rodin’s studio in the Rue de l’Université—subject to constant modification and elaboration.
No one who has ever been absorbed in a particular art will find it difficult to realize the consequences of this chance. The “Gate of Hell” has become the store-house from which Rodin draws his sculptural inspiration. All his thoughts and emotions which call for sculptural expression seem to spend themselves upon it. Rodin’s philosophy is a mixture of Dante and Baudelaire. Consequently, the “Gate of Hell” has practically become a twentieth-century paraphrase of the teachings of the two men, expressed in terms of sculpture. Some of Rodin’s ideas, naturally, fail to find a convenient niche in the gate. Others prove capable of translation into individual works on a larger scale.
For instance, the first idea for the well-known group in the Luxembourg, “[The Kiss]” (Le Baiser), was designed for the Porte de l’Enfer, and showed Paolo and Francesca falling hellward, in the very throes of their guilty passion. In the larger marble, the idea has been purged of its Dantesque character, and Rodin gives us a picture of the eternal beauty of true passion. Primarily, “[The Kiss]” is a study in vigorous manhood, though Rodin is no less successful in his treatment of the softer form of the woman. Neither is reminiscent of the model. But while Rodin has idealized the figures, he has never reached the false idealism which spells convention.
But the real worth of “[The Kiss]” does not lie in its technical achievement, but in the pure, human emotion with which the work is suffused. Note—it is only a minor point—the hand on the woman’s thigh, quivering with passion. Compare it with the unresponsive fingers of the other hand which rest upon the stony rock.
When finished, the “Gate of Hell” is to be of bronze, and it will be executed in high relief after Ghiberti’s model. At present it consists of a two-leaved door, with a frieze, a tympanum, and two lateral columns. In the panels and upon the wide uprights are a multitude of figures—perhaps 100—also in high relief. The whole gate will be at least twenty feet high. Crowning the whole design will be the famous figure of the “[Thinker].”
As in the case of “[The Kiss],” Rodin has translated the “[Thinker]” into a larger size, and the replica now stands in front of the steps of the Pantheon. The nude figure rests his right arm on his left knee, the hand supporting the chin of the dreamer. In the “[Thinker]” we may see the father of men, uncultured and uncouth, brooding over the mad doings of his children. These roll below in the panels and framework of the gate, the victims of all the passions to which mankind is heir.
AUGUSTE RODIN
“THE KISS” (LE BAISER)
Luxembourg, Paris
There is no affectation in reading a profound philosophy into the sculptures of such an artist as Rodin. The nature of the greatest art is such that profundity of thought cannot be divorced from a supreme work. He is not a conscious preacher and moralist. But he is impelled to bear witness to the eternal verities which manifest themselves in nature in the form of beauty. A Turner feels their message in the light and colour of the sky and sea, a Correggio in the glint of the hair or the soft skin of a woman. A sculptor like Rodin gazes upon a well-shaped throat, follows the lines of a well-poised trunk or the bend of a strong man’s loins, and cries, with John Addington Symonds:
“I know not anything more fair than thou.— God give me strength to feel thee, power to speak Through this dumb clay and marble all the thoughts That rise within my spirit while I gaze!— What saith the Scripture? ‘In His image God Shaped man, and breathed into his nostrils breath Of life.’—Here then, as nowhere else, shines God; The Thought made flesh, the world’s soul breathing soft And strong, not merely through those lips and eyes, But in each flawless limb, each mighty curve, Each sinew moulded on the moving form.”
With such a belief Rodin, naturally, rarely drapes his figures. He holds that not only the head and the hand, but every part of the body, expresses human emotion. Again he says: “I never give my model a pose. It is my habit to let them wander about the studio as they will. They rest or move as their mood may dictate. I thus become familiar with every natural, unforced movement of the human body.” In his “St. John the Baptist,” Rodin worked from a model who had never posed before. Before he commenced, he asked the man to raise his arm and begin walking. A moment later he cried: “There now, stop.” The result was a statue organically true, and showing a fine spontaneity which is in the strongest contrast to the highly conventionalized figures of the academics.
Finally, Rodin’s technique and, particularly, the quality in his modelling which has earned him the title of the “First of the Impressionist Sculptors.”
The absence of sharp definition which characterizes Rodin’s later work is evidently based upon principles closely allied to those of the impressionist painter. By relying upon masses of colour, light and shade, the latter secures breadth and an impression of unity which a too rigid adherence to line often destroys. By exaggerating the contour in one place, and by lessening the outline here and sharpening it there, Rodin seeks to get closer to the natural effect produced by the action of light and shadow upon the natural object than a sculptor who relies upon pure form alone.
The case of the sculptor, however, differs considerably from that of the painter. It is, of course, obvious that form is, in a sense, a mere convention, whether in painting or sculpture. No one can argue that the eye has any immediate knowledge of form, any more than it can be said that lines really exist in nature. But form is a convention which every sculptor, from Phidias to Donatello, and from Michael Angelo to Houdon, has accepted. True, no sculptor is concerned with form and form only. Michael Angelo did not forget that his formal arrangements—to describe the figures of “[Dawn]” and “[Night]” in the baldest possible terms—would be seen by the aid of the sun and through the Florentine atmosphere. But it is a long cry from this intelligent use of light and shade to the ultra-modern justification for the distorted grotesques of such a sculptor as Rosso. Here are Rosso’s words:
“Art must be nothing else than the expression of some sudden sensation given us by light. There is no such thing as painting or sculpture. There is only light.”
AUGUSTE RODIN
THE THINKER
The Pantheon, Paris
It cannot be denied that if Rosso’s works are viewed from a given distance, the proportions are rectified by the play of light and shade, and that the result is a surprising illusion of life. But, regarded as statues, the things are little more than fascinating tricks.
In such an absolute sense as this, the term “impressionist” cannot properly be applied to Rodin. It may, however, be used in another and broader sense as indicating an artist who seeks to express the synthesis of things as he sees them under the influence of a mood.
Rodin knows that he is neither a contemporary of Phidias nor Donatello. He rightly refuses to confine himself to forms which the Athenians and the Florentines happened to find most suitable for the expression of their experience. This is the simple justification for much that is regarded as iconoclastic in his artistic creed. When he cries: “Sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of the clean, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures,” Rodin merely asserts a closer kinship with the Gothic than the Greek ideal. Whether Phidias, Scopas, and Praxiteles are right and Rodin wrong, matters little. The all-important question is whether Rodin’s reliance upon the ridges which express spiritual tension, and his willingness to utilize tortuous poses which a Greek would have rejected, have enabled him to sound a new note of passion in sculpture. We hold that they have.
It is too early to judge of the value of this new note. A hundred years hence the world will be able to give a decision. A contemporary can only see a man who expresses what he feels, strongly and fearlessly.