Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)

Prelude to the Twentieth Century
Presentation 6 of 13

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)
The Great Manifestor of Heroic Form
Presented by Roger Weir
Thursday, August 9, 1984

Transcript:
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But that is August the ninth, 1984. This was six lecture and a series of lectures by Roger were on the subject of prelude to the 20th century. Tonight's bright years entitled Roden who lived 1840 to 1917. The great manifestor of her right form.
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Yeah. It's an ongoing part, very long development. How did we get here?
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And we learned very early
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On four
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Years ago or four and a half years ago that we
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Can't trust the ideational history
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To tell us where we are. So
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Magnetised
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By power politics and
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By institutional designs that
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We have no way of really trusting what coordinates
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Are delivered to us. But what we can track is that there have been human beings like ourselves.
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They have what conscientious lives, because they've been like ourselves, either interested in or driven to trying to find an honest way to make sense of the world. We have
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Chosen to
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Investigate in some kind of
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Order sequence person by person. What has occurred in terms of used to call history that got us here,
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Hoping that along the way that we'll pick up some insights, some sense, at least a coordination, which will be
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Useful to us.
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And we've just done
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That. There've been great periods in history. There've been clusters of great individuals occurring all at the same time,
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Wrong
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Spouse century, sometimes where to find anyone interesting one would
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Have had to go out of the world.
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We live in extraordinarily interesting times. That is we have just emerged
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From extraordinarily interesting times
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By the 1980s,
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What that interest is invisible
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And not so easily determine any longer,
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But roughly from the 1770s
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To about the 1930s, went through history was a very attractive field for exploration,
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For the qualities
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Of human nature that we would most like to be able to appreciate to get close to
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A sculptor. And this is the first sculpture that we've run across
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Since make Alliance
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Michelangelo
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On a Saturday, I think about a year ago.
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And we found
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In the lecture and
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As usual
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That
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The individual was great for reasons which were not all that apparent at first, the
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Textbooks don't really tell us why. And only when we take our own human experience to the person in
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An open way, or do we discover what's actually going
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On? And we found Michael, well, some of you were there at the lecture was haunted
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By the power
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Surge of consciousness in his own time and towards the apex of his artistic mission when he was doing the decor of
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The Sistine chapel,
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But the most revealing aspect
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Of the Sistine chapel, that was the back wall and on the back wall,
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And this last judgment Michelangelo painted one of the avenging angels holding the pelt of Michael Angelo in his hand, looking up at eventual price and whatever had been human and Michael Angela had fled health in the hands of the avenging angel, this kind of, uh, of apocalyptic terror
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For shadowing with 17th
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Century that an artistic genius like Michelangelo, artists are very delicate barometers
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For events.
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I won't say history, but events events happened with a wholeness to them.
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And because they happen with a fullness, they send out reverberations and what we call time before and after
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Individuals, since those reverberations beforehand, or we have someone in Rodin who
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Was very much like
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Michael Angelo was sensitive,
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Very great arms and impeccably,
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Honest human being who had the greatest facility to translate his perceptibility through his hands. What he was discovered was that the old
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Classical circle
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That wants to enclose
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Tension permeable, no, it was radiant rather than structured
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That it could not be contained by the shape that visual, tactile presentation could give it.
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And the most important part of reality was that grew from the
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Inside out increasingly. So Rodin's studio, he looked very peculiar towards the end of his life. Here were all these great sculptures that by that time have become world famous,
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Even by that time.
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And they were all marked with graphite in certain areas,
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Which meant that he was still working on them. And he
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Almost never completed a sculpture and the great poet realtor who was a secretary for a year, trying to understand this man said that one would pace around and run out, run down a studio and have the sense that the sculptures were growing
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At such a slow rate, that it might take 20 or 30 years for a new appendage
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To be needed for some ship to be taken away. That sculptures were growing
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In his time is very much our contemporary he's born
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In 1840 and dies in 1917.
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He says where we are several generations before we now experienced it towards the end of his life. She chatted with a number of people. One man, a French man
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Took down some of his
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Statements, words, they've republished this and an English translation, Dover,
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Paperback, um, art and art.
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And he talks about reading meeting rubbed down in her down. Then
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It says you were interested in art. That's very peculiar
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Mean
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You're still interested in art. You're at such a young man. Aren't you interested in what this new age is interested in business and
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Power and politics. You want me to talk to you about art very well.
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He said today, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. This is Rodin speaking.
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Imagine a mega Ethereum or Diplo caucus stocking the streets of Paris. There
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You have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries hours
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Is an echoic of engineers and of manufacturers,
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Not one of artists. The search in modern life is for you. The endeavor is to improve existence materially
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Every day. Science
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Invents, new processes for the feeding, the clothing, transportation of man,
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The manufacturers, cheaply
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Or products in order to give adulterated luxuries to the greatest number. And it is true that there have been great improvements, but in all this, there's no longer a question of the spirit. There's no longer a question of art is dead because artists contemplation art. He has a pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which they're divine. The spirit by which nature nature herself is animated. He checked out intelligence. They send you watch the tea, um, wisdom that goes out and permeates shares reverberates. It is the joy of the intellect, which sees clearly into the universe in which recreates it with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thoughts, seeking to understand the world and to make it understood. But today mankind is British. This is what Rodin was talking about around 19.
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He looked like this one blank. One of the few, one of the few artists, besides aside from Delta, who really got close to her then was the American photographer Steichen and [inaudible] spent a long time, many times with Rodin, I'll get into why photography was so important to him. Anyway, he likes to touch because him was a real wild current artist. And he took a fabulous photograph of one of the most epic Matic sculptures of all time. He wrote down his balls and he stayed up the whole night and it was a night of full moon in starch and made several different kinds, exposures some, several hours long, some very short. And he worked early in the morning before breakfast developing. This is when photographers really knew their stuff. They made their own emotion, they did everything. And finally, he came up with this fantastic shot, this beautiful photograph of the balls, Zack in the Moonlight, and a strip of Moonlight on the base glinting and all the features and mysterious shadow and light that seemed to just be arriving slowly together in some flame of cosmic animation and wrote down.
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So pleased that while staging was washing up, he left 4,000 Franks under his napkin, just to let them know that the old man appreciate it. This gave him later three bronzes was stationed brought back to the U S and one of them was the walking man stacks and said, this was his symbol for the rest of his working artistic life, because it was a somebody on the moon that there never is a moment in life where art is not possible. So the artists must be continuously alert to the moment. And this is the key go down because I wrote down, all of them is one fabric, one piece, one continuous movement, giving it flex here and there. He has twists here and there. What all form is of one continuous piece, the universe is a sculpture and we need to accumulate the perception of it moment by moment. But we have to learn to let it accumulate, let it swell within us. And this is why the patients, this is why the dedication, this is why the continuity of alertness to allow nature, to accrue and its formal presentation to us a sense of the unity of at all. And this is why his sculptures were largely marked for revision even to the end of his life, because they were still growing.
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He was still increasingly occurring to him, what it was that he was doing. And in fact, read on more than almost any other artists save, or our contemporary March to go would take elements of a given sculpture, a given work of art that he had already brought into being. And he would take elements from it and put it into juxtaposition with elements from some new work. And so he had bits and pieces of various sculptures that he would put together. And these odd new Camaro's lying around the studio and the be the arms from one and the head from another, or he'd match up two or three together and make some kind of a grouping. And after two or three years where he changed the grouping change, this or that, it was the attempt to see the interpenetration of all the elements. And if he got an arm, right, if he got a gesture, right, throw it on.
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When he was searching, searching was always looking for the, the symbolic cue that would give him the handle on the vision. And late in his life, he found that the hands brought together like this in a prayer motif where the symbol of Gothic structure in Gothic architecture. And he saw that. And a lot of the gestures towards the end of his career, he went into hand because there's something there even a splayed client type Han still has a version of the structure in that. It must still be there somehow. And so no tension is alien. To me, it is simply a permutation and indication by the reoccurance of these endless permutations of a unified whole behind everything. And it was this that the artist was committed to delivering. He was this in a sense that the artist is a midwife of reality to Matt. He was born in 1840, number 12 in Paris. She was taken away from Paris, very, very young. Well, he was put into it, the school they're lonely, nostalgic, little boy reloca and his book on while there are on the road down, says
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The time may come when
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The history of this life will be invented. It's ramifications, it's episodes, it's details. They will have to be invented. There will be the story of a child who forgot to eat because it seemed to him much more important to carve things in common wood, with a blunt knife. And from the days of his boyhood will be dated some episode containing a promise of future greatness. One of those prophecies after the event, which makes so touching and appeal to the simple, his life will have to be invented because he must've been a little boy. He must've gone through all kinds of growth cycles. It must've been important. Things that we don't know what they are. We know that at the age of 14, he was apprenticed entered into a school of design art as a decorative motif. And it was a profession, something that you did a trade, if you like, he would rather have gone to the school of fine arts in Paris, but he was refused admission. In fact, three times that I refused him admission.
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He had no real formal education as it were some biographers stress, lower middle-class background, illiterate, et cetera, et cetera. But real cause perspective is the one that I would take for us. He must've had a childhood, but there was something mysterious in him that had not yet disclosed itself. And as so often happens with sensitive young person. They're shy of life, the shy of opening up to life because there's a looming inside sense that something else is yet to come. And what that is, one does not know. Yeah. One can only wait sometimes long, lonely years, but the sense of looming is there the sense of presences of rows of people within oneself, stretching back long lines of commitment. And one doesn't know yet what phase one will present to the world.
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It took her a long time to grow up, to wake up, to come to to himself. He grew very slowly. He grew like rocks grow one thing. So Henry Moore in our time when he was young, he said, the only thing that appealed to him was bulk. That one couldn't get enough of it. So all of his early work in sculpture, just ball people make a great thing on earth. Mother. It's just a feeling that one needs capacity. And for Rodin, there was something mysterious in him. And he had no idea of what it might be at the age of 22 craftsman artists, artisan wanted his artists and friends having an affair with his sister, Maria broke up with her jilted, her, she died brokenhearted crumpled inside. There was something essential in the relationship there, the siblings, sister, they were close. One of the earliest photographs. We have show Rodin and his sister sitting together, brother and sister, her death left him heartless. And so he committed himself to a religious life. He entered a convent of the fathers of the holy sacrament.
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He put on the white robe. The white hooded robe had, was ready to spend the rest of his life there as a reckless brother, but fortunate for him. One of the fathers there very sensible Frenchman saw him modeling with clay, saw the loving care, saw the pensive, had a touch of meditation with the hands and the sensibility. And within 10 months, father mark had talked right down into coming back into secular life, sent him home with the admonition to his family, that this man was an artist, not a monk. And certainly not someone in second grade or down then made a beautiful sculpture. A father IMR who was canonized in 1962, became the Saint Saint, uh, Pierre, uh, uh, eMAR. So Rodin began then to search out a new in himself and he needed a woman to be with. And that's when the young 16 year olds year old rose entered into his life rose ViewRay B E U R E T.
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And she was to spend the next 53 years with him. Yes, there were other relationships, but that one was primal. I've often used the term prime Orgill here, meaning that it existed before. And just, uh, three weeks before she died, he, uh, married her and then he died several months later himself in 1917. So they were together all this time from 19 18 64 to 1917, tremendous scope of time. And she was his first model. It was she that disclosed to him. The necessity of the feminine form. You had his looming had been trying to graph the world as a whole and unsuccessful, willing to become a mystic. If that's what it took, realize that for him, the key was in the human body. The human form manifests in a certain focus, a certain tone of energy and comprehension, which is universal. And that there is something in the couple by something is man and a woman.
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And then the formal dynamic formed relationality between them. They form a eternal ratio together. There's no equation there. There's no balancing out one side against another. There's no conflict that the two together present a ratio of reality, which is trustworthy for the human intelligence. That it is not just symbolic, but in a very natural, eternal away. It is regulatory for us about the sense of proportion necessary to understand order. So rose bottling for him in a couple of years, his son, August was born. The son was given the last name of the wife and Rodin produced the first interesting sculpture that we have the man with the broken notes. I think I have a slide of it, a face with a broken nose smashed on all of them. So he's grown up and he's old and he's a little neural.
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He's not classically beautiful. His nose has been broken when he was younger or some other time. And now he's a little older, the broken nose for down. Was that a key insight into the fact that the internal structure, the interiorization of the, of personality also manifests itself in a physical way and physical structure, our bodies, our languages, there are pans of life which have been ripped real in how we are. After that, I became a very great sculptor. He began to see into, for him to read into those messages in coded in the human body.
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And for 13 years, Rodin anonymously worked for other artists. He spent a stent of eight years in Brussels with only time out for a little tour into Italy. And when he came out, he came out in grand style. It came out in 1877 when to enter a sculpture into a salon show, which he did called the age of bronze, this work and everybody poo-pooed it. They said, well, you didn't make this. You just covered somebody with the mold and you took it from line artists. You're a Charlotte it's too good. No one does this. No one has done this since classical Greece. It's not heroic size, like a Michelangelo. It's it's some body. You can see who that is feeling that this was an insult to him as an artist, but particularly it showed a basic universal ignorance on the part of the appreciating public. Exactly that appreciating public that should have known the artists, the judges efficient autos notice who were purchasing those who were producing. None of them knew how to look at it. They didn't know how to see reality when it's presented to them.
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So I wrote down, began his lifelong romance with photography. You got ahold of some of the best photographers that he could. Photography is very new at this time. And from then on for the rest of his life, he chronicled every stage of every sculpture, all along the way. You know that when Rodin gave his whole archives to the state, to the French state in 1916, it was mismanaged for about 60 years. And they finally got some really first-class art historians that ran the Rodin museum in 1977, but a hundred years later, they were overwhelmed by the fact that, uh, certainly researchers and appreciators, uh, uh, realize that the Roadhouse archives are enormous. There are thousands, maybe tens of thousands of classic photographs by all the great photographers. He knew them all, not Darren station so far, any Chronicle, every work, every stage of the way, because for a doubt, he began to understand that photography is not just a record, not just giving you an, an image, but if you work with a time sequence, if you work with a montage of them development in little details that are not at first memorable occur to you.
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And in fact, you can train yourself. He went through the training, I'll put quick lands, memory, see everything in the ground. And remember it accurately later on towards the end of his life, when he was doing the great monument to Victor, Hugo that raped a literary lion, France, that who go with not set for him and Rodin would, uh, chat with, uh, the Maestro and would sketch little cigarette papers, two or three seconds stuck in the pocket with a cigarette paper like that, and would walk around and he'd catch him, catch him 20 or 30 times and little sketches. And you get back home and the master piece, all this together, come out with the man.
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He wanted to see this way. I used to show a French film of Chicago sketching, pigeons, and then look at them. He just flick his eyes up like that. And what would be moving all the time? It's the pen never stops because you don't have to look to see what is there is occurring. Constantly. One only has to receive it in a flash and it's all there. One can train oneself to recall it. Wholesomely not to reproduce in the mind of struggling memory. Now let's see, what did I see? But simply to let it occur in its fullest, how I wrote down was trying to do was to make a sculpture, which word, present that fullness so that one could walk around and live with this sculpture. And it would reveal in simulation symbolic clue to what was real about us. We're like a million diamonds and not just cardboard shape, which we're struggling to parade before other people and say, this is me.
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There's a continuous sensuous, radiant glinting of multidimensionality person is a wind and full for us. And not some kind of sticking my arrow down by utilizing photography came very, very close to art form, which was closest to him other than sculpture. He never took photographs himself. He kept himself committed to his media. That's the kind of dedication that a great artist will have, but for him, photography was extraordinary wrote down with one of the original subscribers to Edvard Moyer bridges, um, animal locomotion, which Dover has reprinted Muybridge took thousands of time-lapse photographs of various animals moving and ended up human locomotives with people walking and cartwheels and jumping. And there would be all these times sequence frames. And the knack here is to see in any given frame that instant, the fulsome ness of which is the continuity of the movement, not to piece the movement together, frame by frame, by frame, but to see in any given frame, the implied resonance of the whole, the origin of that movement, a skeletal structure with sustains it, the muscular expressiveness, which, uh, yields it into form the way in which flesh and skin take it and so on.
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And he has memoirs says other sculpture occupies space exists in space is contrasted to space, but down sculpture has space imploded into it infinitely so that when it opens up it unwraps whole universe, right? Magic magic photography then was extremely valuable to wrote down. And I think I won't go into this, but this book in Rodin studio published by Cornell university press has a little bit in here on some of 'em wrote down for Dan was asked to compare the capacities of artists and photographers who treat motion, his reply. It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography, which lies for in reality time does not stop. And if the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement, which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly less conventional than the scientific image, where time is suspended.
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So that Rodin became less and less interested about finishing form. He became more interested in leaving something unfinished. And this began his preoccupation with having sculptures, which what seem to grow out of the rock, almost like those last sculptures that Michelangelo had done. The forum's fighting to come out of the ground out of the stone, but for wrote down, there was no conflict. There was no fight. There was a long birth and we have some slides. If we can get them going tonight of sculpture or forum seeming to just emerge slowly gracefully because for down and just contradistinction from Michelangelo, it was not conflict that was necessary for creativity, that there was a gracefulness in creativity. There was a ballet in the down where down was, uh, close to downstairs towards the end of his life. When everybody was coming to see him, uh, is a Dora Duncan.
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Lodzinski, uh, just every, he loved dancers because of their understanding of movement and motion. By the end of the 1870s, her dad was coming into his own. He was 40 years old and just beginning his career, but his career just opened up. All of a sudden within three or four years wrote down, makes almost all of the basic starts that he will finish up more or less in his lifetime, just suddenly in the early 1880s, everything appears there was a freeing commission that brought this to a combination and raised, wrote down up to an Exelon of a very, very great artist. One who just completely transcended his time while he personally was opening up a commission, came for him to do the gates of hell enormous work and his conception. He wasn't quite sure just how large you remembered on his Italian tour was wonderful.
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Baptistry doors of gibberish. And so as first sketches have sort of the outline that does baptistry drawers get varied, but he couldn't visualize it all at once because of the way in which, uh, the Greek word is polices, um, creative emergence. And when which the police is works is a slow, graceful, unfolding. And since one is unfolding, the continuous sensuous surface of it all, if you let it go long enough, it'll bring everything. The more world will be in any given piece. So the gates of hell would not be finished until the end of Rodin's lane. He spent about 37 years on it, but as he worked on it, individual pieces became temporarily. We use the term isolated, but it's better to think suspended became suspended in a studio. One of them is the thinker. The thinker is a sentence cool piece at the top, near the top of the gates of hell, just above him.
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About the only thing above the thinker are the three shades. What are the art books? I looked at, call them the three ghosts, the three shades huddled together. There's a copy of the three shades in San Francisco at the palace of Legion of honor, near the end of the parking lot, looking out over five in San Francisco, the three forms, three shades huddled together and all of their huddling, all of that energy that goes into what would be masculine soul, shoulders. He has hunched and curved and art and put it into strong hands and arms that are going down. And all of that vector, those three point down to an abyss, the gates of hell. It's up on a desk, a threshold of infinite nightmare in horror, but the linchpin holding the gates of hell closed is the thinker and all that pressure implodes into himself.
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And that's why his athletic form symbolizes a fist. He seems to be knowing the fist and thought, because there's nothing that man strength and power can do in face of the gates of hell, but there has to be some way to think it through and keep them closed. When that's what the thinker is doing. He is riveting like a, what do they call that? A Keystone to keep that threshold horrible as it is close, and the gates of hell are closed. Like those Janice Gates that Augustus closed in a row, Janice, the two-phase done in the sign of universal peace. The POCs Ramon was that one could close the gates. There was no war anywhere in the empire. And the only man who ever closed in the thousand years of Rome was Augustus. He did it three times within a couple of years, he closed them some outbreak and he would crush lead there. And quash says, I want peace everywhere. Close those gates. The gates of hell were closed. But I wrote down because all of the horribleness, every nightmare of contortion to which we are prayed to is manifested and expressed and presented on the outside of those gates. And all of that. Sidney was city of form. He has brought together and held together because someone is thinking it through.
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And as long as he's working on it, no one's opening those doors. Cause he may come up. He may come up with the idea, does the power of the thinker. And I wrote down and said to him, there's a copy of the sinker. I think we have one here in Muslim, Pasadena anyway, with the commission of the gates of hell, which was in 1880,
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Rodin finally had the great commission that was to occupy the background. And since he was working on it, all different types of sculptures were coming out of this different works. And through the 1880s, he just matured and new commissions would come in rich and famous people would come in to have their, uh, faces done. Sculpted the torsos done busts made even somebody as rustic as George Bernard Shaw loved Rodin, wrote him a wonderful letter saying how artists have to commiserate in times like this and how he'd only sat for one other person, the man who made the wax figures for the children to look at you don't want it.
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Rodin also received commissions from urban centers. The people of Kelly wanted to celebrate something that had happened in the 1340s, six men from Kelly gave themselves up to the king of England as hostages, ready to go for their doom. As history turned out, they were released because the queen was pregnant and she got her husband to relinquish the sentence of death commuted go down in 1884 was given the commission to portray in a sculpture, the six burgers of Kelly. And he worked on them individually and collectively together. And parts of those burgers would go into the gates of hell. There were many other commissions and a couple of years after in 1886, he did the kiss.
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One of the great, really great sculptures on a par with the thinker in terms of its symbolic, understanding symbolic, meaning many others as he would do. These works the various, uh, aspects or parts, sculptural parts, an arm here, neck, a twist of the torso. These were elements. They became a vocabulary for him. And he began building this huge vocabulary because he wanted to describe sculpturally the gates of hell, that if he could bring it off, they would remain closed because the sculptor would have delivered the very symbolic aspect, which not only frightens man, but what you're sure is, man, at the same time of his triumph through comprehension, he threw the 1880s and 1890s just became more and more famous, but almost every major step of the way there was controversy. And finally, in 1900, there was a real break between Rodin and the artistic establishment and Rodin sensing that something needed to be done set up.
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He had his first one man exhibition. The world fair was in Paris in 1900. And just inside entrance, Rodin had to build a special studio, an art gallery, all of his own. And none of his words were executive exhibited in the cluttered, uh, train Depot type amphitheater of the art establishment building Rodin's it was referred to as Rodin's desert. It looked like art galleries look today, rather sparse a pedestal here, like Raul, something there. And he brought his works in and he brought his friend who had a business across the wage, your way, who was a photographer. And they saw photographs. And these photographs of Rodin's work went around the world. All the visitors took them home and people became acquainted on a worldwide scale. Rodin was the first great world wide famous artists did his own PR. He never had an agent real impresario.
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And so began coming from all over the world to see Rodin and as tells men of his understanding that he was on the right track. He had the exhibition hall that art gallery torn down stone by stone, bought it all back from the construction companies, moved it all out to the countryside. Jim made air and had it reconstructed right next to his own house there. And this was the place the visitors came to Rodin became the first world class artists, someone for whom the entire world was open. His fame spread everywhere. The people of Prague Czechoslovakia invited him to come and have a one man show in Prague. He went, they loved him. And Rodin then became, uh, elected as president of many organizations. He became the head of the, um, society of, um, men of letters, uh, in, uh, France, uh, Zola then commissioned him Emile Zola, commissioned him to do this, a monument to Victor Hugo, which I think I have some slides of here at any rate for down as his life went on, became more and more the focus of art as a world wide phenomenon.
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He was the first superstar in this realm. And when we come back from the break, I hope to show you some slides in the house. I want to give you some insights from Grenier, Maria [inaudible], who was the secretary for awhile. And who's a Rodin book. It's very hard to find in translation. Some of his insights and these slides I think will bring out the quality that was there. Someone said of Rodin that when he left the room, he left a gentle tenderness in the air almost as if a beautiful woman had just been there. Did that kind of equality. [inaudible]
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how these extended or words are received. It's uh, was such a disparate, um, experiential matrix that exists in a lecture like this. And we have a real interesting city here. You know, Los Angeles is very much a reincarnation of ancient Alexandria now, and we have, uh, all kinds of currents that are not just from our time, but from other time periods that are here too. And so we have a very interesting mix. And so I never know just who is here, where, where are those paths come from? I remember once I, in the midst of the riots and travail in Berkeley, I gave a lecture on Gandhi at the university of California, Berkeley. And it was like one of these, uh, last jet show kind of courageous things two weeks before they'd burnt Wheeler auditorium to the ground. And so I didn't know what was going to happen.
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And I brought in from India, this a seven hour film called gem Mahatma, and, uh, it's a long, 14 real documentary and Gandhi. And, uh, and I was doing this flamboyant lecture and I just didn't know what was going to happen. So we, we had the big auditorium in, um, in, came about a thousand people and they filtered in for about an hour and we put off the starting time and people with auto harps and all sorts of beings came in. This was the sixties, you know, so I, I addressed it as, um, as fellow beings
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[inaudible]
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And I think some things said right on, but, um, so I never searched just how this is being received. The only thing I can assure you is that, um, when my part absolutely extemporaneous, I don't write this down. I don't preconceive it or map it out. And I try to bring to you, um, the quality of the moment and of the person and for whatever you can do. We're not always blessed by having an insight into someone on the level of Relic, his insights or a down, if you haven't read, um, Relica Rainer, Maria [inaudible], even in English. Translation is one of the great poets. He believed that, excuse me. Um, it's kind of interrupting here really felt that poets were the angelic presences of our time that we lived in such a corrupt time that there were no saints so that the poets had to take over the work of the saints. And so he opened himself up to metaphysical visions, which he said, constitutionally, he was not prepared for. And the first world war of course burnt him out for 10 years. He couldn't write a word. He went drifting from, uh, castle to castle. They always stayed with, uh, Royal families across the face of Europe. And suddenly in 1922, he got a vision and he was staying in the Duino castle.
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And he said, it was just like being possessed by invisible spiritual forces. And he began writing the great poetic sequence known as the Duino elegies and right in the midst of that, an even stronger hurricane of spiritual forest, uh, grabbed him. And he wrote in just a few short weeks, the sonnets to Orpheus, which are sort of the mystical high watermark of European literature. And real as an individual lived with Rodin for about 10 months. He was there in the studio every day. And he was there as the special kind of an invoice, a spiritual messenger, an angelic presence. And he went there, uh, early in the 20th century to be with him to, to see Rodin working because to him, Rodin was not an artist. He wasn't elemental force. He was some powerful, natural force expressing itself through a person. And so he went there in the Indian sense of Darshawn to pay homage to this and to try and appreciate to try and let his, uh, great capacity in language, be splayed out by the experience of this force. So he writes, there are a great many who write about Rodin. That would be a long and difficult task to elucidate them, but it is not necessary. All of these events surround the name, not the work, which has far outgrown the sounding greatness of the name and is now nameless as a plane is nameless or an ocean. The name of which has found only on maps in books or in the mouths of men, but which in reality, when you go to the ocean is vastness movement and depth.
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That's how I began to this wrote down. He writes and looking back from the plastic art of the middle ages, back to the antique, and again, beyond the antique to the beginning of arrows, whose age cannot be reckoned, did it not seem that had every hopeful or describing turning point of history the human soul had ever and ever again demanded this art, which gives more than word and picture more than similitude and appearance, the simple becoming concrete of its longings or its apprehensions. And finally, in the Renaissance there arose a great plastic art at that period. When life was renewed, when the mystery of the human countenance was discovered, what made the Renaissance? Wasn't it not sophisticated architecture, then they never built like they did in the high Gothic.
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It wasn't literature, high Gothic even has a better literature, but then Renaissance has the portrait. Somebody, the focusing of all of our capacities to see who this is, to understand that person, it is the portrait that marks the Renaissance, the portrait of a human being, someone we can know, the human countenance was discovered when gesture and all its greatness developed and now was not this again, an age demanding the same mode of expression, the same strong and penetrative inner penetration of all in which it defied utterance, which was confused and enigmatic, the arts had in some way become renewed, filled and animated by eager expectation. Perhaps it was just this plastic art still hesitating in the shadow of a great past, which was destined defined that which the sister arts were feeling for groping light and with a great desire. No, at this time, especially in France was alerting itself to a level of comprehension that we still have not digested in 1889, Rodin and Monet held a joint ex audition together. They just shattered all of the norms of what was expected from artists because their vision, both of them transcended most of the comprehension, not only of their time, but for centuries before that, and still has not been appreciatively assimilated yet a hundred years later when we get to Monet, we'll see, we'll get to Monet.
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180 had a collection of several thousand Japanese. Yukio prints you all about Zen. The west is not naive. Not at all. We're not new to wisdom, but real kid puts his finger on it. What is it that we desire? What is it that art seeks to find [inaudible] To help bring an age tormented by conflicts, which lay almost without exception in the realm of the invisible, almost without exception in the realm of the invisible, the language of this art was the body is the only way we can make it visible. The portrait is a threshold of discovery for the invisible or
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[inaudible].
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And when had this body last been seen, when has man last been seen layer upon layer of clothing has been laid upon it like constantly renewed varnish, but beneath these protecting in crustaceans, the living soul breathlessly at work upon the human face had transformed the body to it would become a different body. If it were now uncovered, it would probably reveal a thousand forms of expression for all that was new and nameless in its development for all those ancient secrets, which emerging from the unconscious like strange river gods lift their dripping heads from out of the wild current of the blood. And this body could not be as beautiful as that of the Greeks. It must present an even greater beauty. 2000 more years of life had held it between its hands had wrought upon it caught its secrets and had not ceased to work upon it.
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Day and night, painting had dreamed of this body and had adorned it with radiance and steeped it in Twilight had surrounded it with delicacy and charm of every kind had felt its texture, as one feels, the pedal of a flower had been born along by it as by a wave, but in plastic art to which it properly belonged, it was at best unknown. And so this was the great task for a road down to disclose. What does the universal human form look like naked? Now let's take the layers of incrustation off. Let's let the invisible show itself. And so Rodin sculpture is not the photographic imitation of someone real. It's the presentation of the symbolic reality, which we're trying to get to in ourselves. Well, the CSUN slides and see how some of this looks to us. I have all these things mark and I, I never get to them thing. I don't prepare. Let's see what some of this invisible, it looks like
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Familiar. We could turn the lights off. Somebody would like my daughter. Thank you. I don't know why we start with the cast. Especially a magenta printed. She know these itinerary lectures. I try not to lard up the presentation experience of it with a lot of commentary. One can add commentary when can talk aesthetic, get something else. Something else is being revealed. The key here is like a musical pitch pipe. The notion of a single form, this man and this woman to gather are discovering the singularity of the form of themselves. They're not a polarity coming to a resolution.
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They're a singularity flow. And three, this is how I wrote down. This is what he's talking about, but he's not using words. He's using a plastic form. This works Victor who wrote the sculptor form brings into itself, internalizes into itself. The spatiality and that spatiality is not just a dead space. Nothing is dead. The world is one form. This incident is the doctrine of the flower. Maya scripture, the quiet in what is very much like Rodin's view, but that focus is dynamic and reads out. Radiates out, gives back out in our comprehension so that if we're with that work, it is not just simply a sculptural object, but we adjoin ourselves through our sensitivity to that form. And we discover the continuity of that. Singularity extends to us. This is great. Okay.
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No balls out. He worked on it for years when he exhibited in 1897 to the very people who had commissioned it, they rejected. We don't want it. They said it's ugly. He may 22 separate sculptures for the habit, eight for the body. And about 16 for the clothing, he had never met falls Zack. So he did all kinds of research. He found Balzac's tailor in Paris. He had to make clothes. He'd done for clothes into this, what plaster and then headed form. So he can look at the size of the man. He read his works through and through again, we have a tape lecture on Belzec the comedy humane, which is extraordinary work. How's that coming to present, man, in one grand tapestry, entire human comedy, by taking a cross section of the Paris that he knew, he thought everyone who will ever be is here now.
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So if we do it complete, we show inclusion. Everyone typically who will ever exist, certain great writers in our tradition, read their balls, act like Faulkner. And that's why he wrote that you opened up a tophus series. That was the American comedy [inaudible], but he closed the balls act because he has brought all of this population into himself. Then what is expressively focused here is the only uncalled portion of the body. The face, the portrait, it's all there. I looked at an art book at the county museum today that described the woman as indifferent to the young man's advances and how wonderful the sculpture has because it shows the hot and cold that kind of talk is garbage misses the sculpture. And it has nothing. It's third rate rehashing of an insight that was misunderstood from Nalco.
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We're all sensible. Now we can see the gender, meaning that the openness, the dedication to preserving the openness, the interference by the hand, in the inner penetration of the gentleness, the delicacy of it, there's not the meeting with the two is the discovery of a one, which is graceful. And this is what is present. One of his great portrays. And you can see here, the emergence as a form from the stone. Do you want to lard everything out with dates and titles and comments and so forth? Okay. Matt [inaudible] is from south America. So she has this interesting, again, he is presenting the, the balance point of a feminine that in between the breathing in, and the breathing out of this world, that the activities of this world, of the swirl of personalities and power politics and so forth is still underneath it all underneath that tapestry, the continuity of the fabric of a gentle discovery of you and she at this moment presents through herself.
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The great composer goes to Kamala. I tried to get a slide of his portrait of Nijinsky, but is that an indicator or a slump? This sculpture is simply called thought, this is his longtime mistress, Camille fellow artists. Uh, a number of works with the peasants. She was on the head of the woman and just that emerges from the plane of the raw material. And her gaze is not out towards an object, but inner resonance brought into the material itself so that the sinking through of that symbolic realization penetrates through to the material. The rock itself is resonant with her probing realization.
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I have a slide somewhere at Henry Moore, walking through the marble of Carrara, running his hand, along the stone, feeling the life, just feel the hand of God. Notice the themes in Rodin coming back again. The hand face the form, the arms, the position of the body, the char cells, the relationship of form to the hand of God. This of course can be displayed a 90 degree angle, several different ways. This is the way that he had it in his studio. So the adventures of light and shadow, we have to slow ourselves down from freeway speed, from telephone line speed. We have to get back to watching the shadows of sunlight move among the leaves for hours on end. At that time sound to get that frame of unfoldment, that it might take three or four days for the flower bud, we can do that. We can, we can adjust our sense of proportion to meet the expressive contingencies of reality.
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These are sirens. These sirens will appear as many of as works again and again, different elements change somewhat. These three sirens in their masculine form are like the three shades over the gates. And now they will appear in some of the early works, early versions of the work of the monument to Victor Hugo. And finally, there'll be toned down a little bit. And what will emerge is not so much the emphasis on the sirens, luring Victor Hugo on to write those great works, but they, as they call them down structurally in their dominance over Victor Hugo's head, his hand comes up and the final work has his hand out as if he is trying to touch the invisible, the theory on not to reality itself and he's listing like his head caught, not so much to the sirens, but to the melody of life, which their keynote has allowed him to tune into the radio station. But the messages, the socks are from life herself.
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Here are the three shades, and this is on top of the gates of hell. If one dropped a plum block, you're looking for the, um, for the, the place to drill. It falls on the fist of a thinker straight down. There he is. He's not a V-shape, he's an athlete, but man, as an athlete of the spirit, [inaudible] all right, the mind is alive. Let it be elaborate. We can move in elaborate, but I'd love to have a sculpture spot in nature, not to decorate a garden, but to have the garden create the tone for the sculpture.
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He could do the typical boss for the commission. Yeah. And then you could take it as lifelong learning and presenter here had been together at this time for about 25 years. She was always there for him. Whenever you see family photographs, no matter how many grand the ladies that are clustered around Ramadan, there was always, she always has given seat of honor here at the center, the burgers of Kelly, it's the resonant unity of the supposedly individual parts striking a chord of form that make her a world-class. This is here in LA. It used to be there. They're now tearing that up to build more buildings.
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The beautiful experience that was here is being replaced by more buildings. That's the tone of the county. This is one of the burdens. Michelangelo, sculpture looks good and sign, throw it down. Stomped you're suddenly belongs outside with Henry boards. It's got to be on the side. [inaudible] the unity of that ensemble moves like a wave. And the one fist coming out speaks for as one move, move around the ensemble. Each individual piece resonates with all the others way, which you can only speak about it as a single word, a single form. We're all burgers of killing. They're all going to die. We're all committed to the fact that we are willing to give ourselves up for the ideal. [inaudible].
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Sometimes the giving up for the Mondale seems catastrophic. And yet, and yet you look at E Rebecca says, she seems to be reverb gently tripling in upon herself. But as she is doing that with her form, with her arms, you can see the robust health of the woman. She is the mother of man. There is a counter movement of fecundity, which balances out the shrift. This was to be a monument to the war dead. The war of 1870 Paris was taken over by Germany or 18, 17 commune Paris get frightened. They would be autocratic powers of Europe that maybe the French revolution ideals were not dead. And people were going to take over their own destiny. And what are we going to do with this idea gets around. So let's go in and take over for them. The age of bronze. This is one of his first works, 1877. This is the one he was accused of casting a real person. I don't know if they put them inside or [inaudible] I think that's it. No one more.
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Well, the only thing we can do with an artist like Rodin is take ourselves to the works. Unfortunately in Los Angeles area, there are go and take yourself. Next week, we come back to the stage. We come back to someone who was quite an interesting, you know, wrote down, admired a Dante and Bob layer tried to fuse the epic and the, and the horrific together in a lot of his vision to steel himself to endure next week, we'll have Gibbs Gibbs, very interesting case in point, very interesting person. And in his works is someone said towards the end, it's in place where like invisible machines working silently, and we have only glimpses and flashes of him in the characters of the play. And that the more you saw the play, like when we did awaken the more mysterious it's because the point was perhaps not the play, but what the play was revealing to us was ecstatic underneath that often we'll see that next week. [inaudible].

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