You Must Change Your Life (6 page)

The impending separation devastated Rilke, but he did not dare defy her. The day after they returned to Berlin he accepted an invitation to visit a friend at an artist colony in northern Germany. It would give her some space for now, but, as Rilke's verse had promised, she would not be able to swat him away so easily. For the rest of his life, he would cry out to Andreas-Salomé whenever he couldn't write, or whenever he tumbled into recesses of himself so remote that he feared he might disappear forever. Each time, she would come, take him calmly by the hand and lead him back into the light.

CHAPTER
3

A
FTER ABANDONING HIS STUDIES AT THE JARDIN DES PLANTES
in the late 1850s, Rodin spent four years working as a trade sculptor and making his own art in the mornings and at night. He rented his first studio near the Gobelins tapestry factory, in an unheated, barely converted horse stable. It cost ten francs a month, which left him with nothing to hire models, who often earned as much in a few hours as he did in an entire day. Instead he was forced to make do with amateurs desperate enough to pose for his poverty rates.

For a little extra drinking money, an elderly Greek handyman known as Bibi was happy to offer his services to Rodin. The man had a broken nose and such a “terribly hideous” face that Rodin could hardly bear the thought of modeling it at first. It “seemed so dreadful to me,” he said. But the man was cheap and already worked in the studios three times a week as a sweeper, so, beginning in the fall of 1863, Rodin faithfully began to sculpt one pit and furrow after another into a bust, treading across the clay as heavily as life had tread across Bibi.

Over the next eighteen months, Rodin started to notice occasional glimpses of handsomeness in Bibi's face. He had a nicely shaped head and, beneath the ravaged façade, there was a certain nobility to the bone structure. His was not entirely unlike the faces on view at
the Louvre, Rodin thought, so many of them also being Greek and timeworn.

The bust Rodin completed in 1863 was a radical departure from the polished portraiture of the day. Baudelaire wasn't being entirely hyperbolic when he provocatively titled an essay fifteen years earlier, “Why Sculpture Is Boring.” Until then, sculpture had been made almost exclusively as decoration—filigree on a cathedral, for example, or a war memorial in a park. Before the latter part of the century, even the best new sculpture was still being mounted on the sides of buildings, like Carpeaux's drunken dancers on the façade of the Paris Opera. If a freestanding work made it into a museum, it was probably because its original habitat had been destroyed.

Whether Rodin knew it or not, his
Man with the Broken Nose
was a brazen affront to this long, unquestioned tradition. The unknown man's face would never have appeared on a monument or a building, except perhaps as a symbol of sin. But Rodin's Bibi was truly ugly, not allegorically ugly. He was a self-contained being, not intended as a denunciation of something else, as Rilke would later notice: “There are a thousand voices of torment in this face, yet no accusation rises. It does not plead to the world; it carries its justice within itself, holds the reconcilement of all its contradictions.”

The 1864 Paris Salon seemed like the right time for Rodin to introduce the bust to the public. The names of his contemporaries—Monet, Cézanne, Renoir—were starting to become well known, even if they were not yet fully accepted by the establishment salons. Two-thirds of the submissions to the previous year's official salon were rejected, including Manet's scandalous
Déjeuner sur l'herbe
. But they went on view in a separate show, derisively dubbed the Salon des Refusés, which ultimately proved far more popular than the main event, and made Manet a cult hero.

But before Rodin had a chance to submit his bust to the jury that winter, the temperature in his studio dipped below freezing. The back of the terra-cotta head cracked off and shattered on the floor. When Rodin went to work one morning and saw the mess, he stared at it for
a long while and then decided it actually looked better this way. The mask now bore the reality of Bibi and Rodin's impoverishment on its surface, expressing the coldness of life in a most literal way.

Rodin submitted the work to the 1864 salon as a mask rather than a bust, but jurors rejected it that year, and again the following year. Rodin did not take the news as hard as he might have in the past. He knew the sculpture marked a crucial revelation, whether anyone else realized it or not. Bibi had taught Rodin that beauty was about truth, not perfection. “There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character . . .” he would conclude. The human being, flawed creature that it is, cannot relate to perfection. But people can empathize with scars, wrinkles and lines, which together add up to the semblance of a lifetime.

“The mask determined all my future work,” Rodin later said. “It was the first good piece of modeling I ever did.” As he started to acknowledge his talent, he also realized that it came, like many gifts, with a catch. Artistic gifts had to be shared with others or else they lost their worth. The burden fell on him to find an audience and to make seen that which is inherently invisible. As such, many gifts go unrealized, while the gifted go on suffering, carrying the absence inside them like an unreturned love. Rodin, like Rilke, spent his youth crushed under the weight of his gift's imperative. It was not until 1864 that he met the woman who would act as his witness and committed guardian for life.

ROSE BEURET WAS EIGHTEEN
and already a seasoned laborer when she met the twenty-four-year-old sculptor in 1864. She had recently moved from her family's vineyard in Champagne to take a job as a seamstress. Down the street from Rodin's studio, Beuret was stitching flowers to adorn ladies' hats while he was sculpting them out of stone for a new opera house, the Théâtre de la Gaîté, which was being built to replace the one Haussmann tore down on the Boulevard du Temple, or, as it had become known, the “Boulevard of Crime.”

Beuret had dusty brown hair that curled around the edges of
her bonnet. She had a tough, tense face and easily agitated eyes that impressed Rodin from the start. “She didn't have the grace of city women, but all the physical vigor and firm flesh of a peasant's daughter, and that lively, frank, definite masculine charm which augments the beauty of a woman's body.” He invited her to model for him at once. Beuret, probably welcoming the extra income and a friend in the city, gladly agreed.

She came to the job as “tough as a cannon ball,” Rodin said. She posed in his cold studio for hours with one arm stretched downward, as if setting a mirror on a nightstand, and the other sweeping up her hair. “I had put into her all that was in myself,” he said of the figure he made in Beuret's likeness, which was to become his first life-sized figure, titled
Bacchante
. Rodin worked on it on Sundays and in the mornings before reporting to his job sculpting clay maquettes for the popular Romantic artist Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. While he was saving the money to have
Bacchante
cast, he set it aside and moved on to other projects. Eventually, he filled his studio and needed to relocate to a larger space. As the movers carried his patient
Bacchante
away, the figure started to wobble in their arms and fell to the floor. When Rodin heard the crash he ran toward the sound and, to his horror, saw that “my poor bacchante was dead.”

The flesh-and-blood Beuret would not depart so easily, however. After her first modeling session, “she attached herself to me like an animal,” Rodin said. The pair soon became lovers and formed a formidable partnership built around their labor. Sculpting was Rodin's job; Rodin was hers. She became his best studio assistant, posing for him in the mornings, then returning again at night to cover the unfired mounds of clay with damp rags to keep them from drying out. She continued working as a seamstress on the side and, every once in a while, Rodin helped her sew buttons.

Rodin was loath to admit how much he depended on Beuret. When asked about their relationship he would say with a shrug, “It is necessary to have a woman.” But he didn't believe a man needed a wife, so when she gave birth to their son out of wedlock in 1866 the boy's birth certificate
read Auguste-Eugène Beuret, father “unknown.” Nonetheless, they remained together for the rest of their lives, with Beuret acting as Rodin's chief adviser, partner, lover and, ultimately, the sustainer of his gift.

RODIN WENT TO GALLERIES
as an observer over the next decade. Eleven years had passed since the Paris Salon rejected his
Man with the Broken Nose
, and he had not submitted another work since. Sensing that an artist could stake a career on a single statue, he was determined to return only when he had realized a masterpiece.

He was confident in his technical abilities, but unsure of how to synthesize his miscellaneous education into a proper life-sculpting practice. Lecoq had taught him the rules of attention; Barye taught him movement; but still no one had taught him the human form. So, in 1875, he went to Italy to learn straight from the source: Michelangelo.

He packed a bag with French sausage so he wouldn't have to eat the seemingly iron-deficient Italian cuisine, and then boarded a train. He took the scenic route, passing through France and Belgium to see the Gothic cathedrals along the way. “Dinant is picturesque, but Reims, its cathedral, is of a beauty I have not yet encountered in Italy,” he wrote to Beuret.

All of Florence was celebrating Michelangelo's four hundredth birthday when Rodin arrived that winter. He visited the Medici Chapel, where Michelangelo's statue of Lorenzo de Medici sat in a contemplative pose much like
The Thinker
would. He went on to examine the contours of every Michelangelo figure he could find in Florence before traveling on to Rome to see the paintings at the Sistine Chapel. The experience totally destabilized Rodin. Every decision Michelangelo made seemed to run counter to what Rodin had learned from the Greek artists at the Louvre. “ ‘Hold on!' I said to myself, ‘why this incurving of the body? Why this hip raised, this shoulder lowered?' ” Yet he knew Michelangelo would not have miscalculated.

Now that he was a student again, Rodin re-created Lecoq's old exercises, filling his notebooks with sketches “not directly of his works,
but of their scaffolding; the system I'm building in my imagination in order to understand him,” he wrote to Beuret. Gradually, “the great magician is letting me in on some of his secrets.”

When Rodin returned home a month later, he was brimming with ideas. He set to work at once on the statue that would finally win him entrée into the salons. He found his model in a young Belgian soldier with a graceful musculature. The man posed with one fist clutching a spear-like rod, the other hand raised to his head as if in distress. Rodin examined his form obsessively, from the front, back and sides, then in three-quarter profiles. He climbed up a painter's ladder to capture the view from above, then crouched on the floor to look from below. He spent three months on one leg, and altogether a year and a half modeling each successive contour inch by inch.

The result was an uncannily realistic plaster man, which Rodin titled
The Age of Bronze
. His eyes half closed, this was someone who had seen something terrible, as if he had just come upon the slain body of his lover, or as if he realized that he was the one who had killed her. Rodin eventually removed the spear in order to preserve an unobstructed view of the figure's profile, a decision that only added to the already enigmatic pose.

The salon admitted
The Age of Bronze
in 1877. It was received with such enthusiasm that the French government asked to purchase a version of it for the city. But then the salon opened in Paris and Rodin's fastidious accuracy backfired. Critics complained that
The Age of Bronze
was
too
realistic. It was a “study rather than a statue, a too servile portrait of a model without character or beauty; an astonishingly exact copy of a low type,” wrote Charles Tardieu in
L'Art
. Others went further and accused Rodin of casting it directly from the body, a dishonorable process known as
surmoulage
.

The government sent experts to inspect the work in person. They concluded that even if it was not a life cast “in the absolute sense of the word, casting from life clearly plays such a preponderant part in it that it cannot truly be regarded as a work of art.”

Of all the insults Rodin would endure in his long, controversial
career, the charge of
surmoulage
would rank among the most vicious. It was tantamount to accusing a writer of plagiarism. “I am literally bruised in body and in spirit,” he told Beuret. But he did not show it in the passionate letters of defense he sent to newspapers. He begged officials to look at photographs of his model; they would see that the man was slightly heavier in real life than in the sculpture, proving that it could not be a cast. He rallied a group of the day's leading sculptors, including Alexandre Falguière and Rodin's former boss Carrier-Belleuse, to sign a statement refuting the charges of
surmoulage
. They went on to further praise the statue as an example of “a very rare power of modeling, and even more of great character.”