April 19, 1936
A selective but fully characteristic exhibit of prints by the three outstanding representatives of the older generation of French sculptors --- Rodin, Maillol and Despiau --- assembled and arranged by Curator Carl O. Schniewind in the Print Gallery of the Brooklyn Museum, has more than a limited interest. The prints reveal an aspect of these artists less well known in this country than their sculpture. Though some of the plates are curiosities rather than chefs d'oeuvres, other rank with the finest printed work of their generation and would entitle the makers to consideration as artists of the first importance if they had produced no sculpture whatsoever. Moreover, since it first occurred to a gallery in Paris about twenty-five years ago to exhibit a group of prints by sculptors --- the prints then shown included Rodin's but not those of Despiau of Maillol --- a number of the more enthusiastic and lyrical French writers about art, not to say critics, have written some very enthusiastic things about these prints. An opportunity to check up on the eulogies of these eloquent writers is amusing in itself, and profitable. In justice to their opinions it must be said that there are points on which the prints oblige one to agree. There are other points on which difference of opinion is possible
Knowing that the prints were made by sculptors, it is very easy to permit oneself to find sculpturesque qualities in the prints and to emphasize the salience of form suggested by masses of light and shade or by pure line. The possibility of producing such a three-dimensional and solid effect by these means is not a novel discovery due to the practice of sculpture, but a very common preoccupation with draftsmen who have never touched clay, plaster, bronze or stone. The relation of these prints to sculpture is a seductive thought on which paragraphs and pages have been written, and there is very little truth in it. The prints of Rodin and Despiau bear slight relation to their work as sculptors. Neither of them is primarily a sculptor anyway, in the very strictest sense of the word. Rodin especially was a modeler, and the salient quality of his work is the fluency of a soft pliable material, as close as possible to real flesh. He was quite possibly the greatest artist-anatomist of all time. As an anatomist his preoccupation was the infinite variety of human movement, which is the softest, least monumental, least sculptural anatomical quality. One the contrary his prints have quite the opposite feeling, the crispness of a thing cut in metal. The head of Antonin Proust, the bust of Bellone and the two heads of Victor Hugo, has all the sharpness and the static dignity of a very fine medal or coin. He has been justly praised for showing the most precise feeling for drypoint from his very first essay in that medium. It is a feeling absolutely at the opposite pole from his while manner as a sculptor.
With Despiau there is an equally marked contrast between his work as a draftsman or lithographer and his work as a sculptor, but the contrast is of a different sort. Whereas in the portrait busts and and the allegorical figures of Despiau the sculptor there is absolutely the most essential sculptural quality, enduring grandeur and the rugged appreciation of a hard, dense and unyielding material, it is the opposite effect that his lithographs emphasize, the texture and softness of flesh, the beauty of a casual and non-monumental attitude.
With Maillol alone there is some justice in perceiving the sculptor in the lithographer, the etcher, the cutter of woodblocks. Though he has in all his work the fine hearty sensuality of the peasant, the pure broadly human animal gusto, which is as far removed as possible from the self-conscious of the lascivious, he has avoided the individual identity which Despiau emphasizes and to which he gives an added property of typical if not general human significance. Maillol alone has insisted on presenting the human form, no matter how filled with animal life, no matter how desirable, as a monumental form, a thing of life larger than life. His smallest figurine conveys the sense of great proportions. Maillol presents the figure as a thing to be worshipped not so much with the eyes as with the tactile sense, the sculptural sense, with hands. He presents it infused with life, but static. The figure of a peasant woman by Maillol evokes neither passion nor idea. It evokes a more profound physical relation toward a creature that always seems to be a transitional state between flesh and stone. He gives the effect regarding all women as potential monuments as surely as his monuments are always almost women.
This quality is as apparent in his outline etchings and woodblocks, his fully modeled lithographs, as it is, in his sculpture. Here indeed there is a very direct relation between sculpture and print. The print has a little more of flesh, of life, of movement, but there is definitely the suggestion of a form in stone. He catches in his prints the moment just before the woman becomes a statue as in his statues he suggests the moment before the statue breathes as Galatea.
Rodin, Maillol and Despiau, individual as are the qualities they have contributed to sculpture, all in various ways are heirs to the great French tradition in sculpture — a tradition which can be traced in France consecutively as in no other country from Reims, Amiens, and Chartres, through Jean Goujon, Germain Pitou, Puget, Houdon, Rude, Barye, David d’Angers, Carpeaux, etc. Of the three, Aristide Maillol has been the most important and the most prolific as a print maker, although Rodin produced notable specimens in drypoint. Despiau’s prints are restricted to one single—sheet lithograph and several books illustrated with lithographs.
Auguste Rene Francois Rodin was born in Paris, November 12, 1840. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and was the pupil of Barye, Carrier—Belleuse, Lecoq de Boisbaudran, and in some measure of the Belgian Van Rasbourg, under whom he worked on the sculptural decoration of the Brussels Boursc from 1864 to 1870. Subsequently he worked in Italy, but finally returned to Paris, where he established his studio. He died November 17, 1917. His prints are the product of a visit with the etcher Alphonse Legros in London in 1881 and of a few years following. Rodin’s first drypoint, Les Amours Conduisant le Monde, was drawn on the back of a plate on which Legros had etched the head of a young man. This plate Le Printemps, and Les Ames du Purgatoire are charming but slight figure studies in which one can see the allegorical interest of the artist if nothing of his manner in sculpture. The two heads of Victor Hugo, the Bust of Bellone and the profile of Antonin Proust (which Rodin worked over and developed into finished portraits of the first quality) are not, as has been said, studied from his sculpture of the same subjects, but are in their origin preliminary studies for these works or studied from preliminary studies. The three heads of Henri Becque, which remained a group of sketches, is of the same character. Comparison with the sculpture makes this point very clear.
Eleven drypoints and six lithographs by Rodin were cataloged by Louis Delteil. There is one additional drypoint which was unknown to Delteil. Of these, eight drypoints and the illustrated volume of Le Jardin de Supplices by Octave Mirbeau, which contains the lithographs, are included in the Brooklyn Museum exhibit. Two pieces of sculpture by Rodin are also shown, a bronze cast of L’Homme qui Marche, which was a preliminary study for his John the Baptist Walking, and a small terracotta.
Aristide Maillol was born December 8, 1861, Banyuls—sur-Mer in southwestern France, near Pyrenees and on the Mediterranen. He first studied painting under Cabanel at l’Ecole des Beaux Arts and was strongly influenced by Gauguin, who first started him making woodcuts in 1890 and lithographs in 1895. As a sculptor Maillol is self taught. He works at his birthplace and at Marly-le-Roy near Paris. His prints have been made at several periods and chiefly for publication as book illustrations. Thirteen lithographs, three woodcuts, eight etchings and one book illustrated by Maillol, Ovid’s Ars Amoris, are included in the Brooklyn Museum exhibit. His sculpture as represented by a small bronze and a small terracotta.
Charles Despiau was born November 49 1874, at Mont-da-Maroan in southwestern France. He studied at l’Ecole des Arts Decoratifs under Barrias and also worked under Rodin, who was one of the first to discover his talent. He now works in Paris. The one single—sheet lithograph by Despiau and the edition of Baudelaire’s Poems which is illustrated by his lithographs are included in the Brooklyn Museum exhibit. bronze head of a woman represents his sculpture.
The works included in the exhibition have-been lent by Mr. George W. Davidson, M. Jean Goriany, Dr. Jerome Selingcr, Mrs. C. S. Steichen, Miss Edith Wetmore, B. Kennedy and Co.; N. Knoedler and Co., the M. A. McDonald Galleries, the Weyhe Gallery and anonymous lenders.
Brooklyn Museum Archives. Records of the Department of Public Information. Press releases, 1931 - 1936. 04-06_1936, 059-61. View Original
