shielding the eyes of a man, waking, from the brightness. These eyes are almost in the stone (so marvellously is the unawakenedness expressed here …)’ The following day, on his first visit to the pavilion at Meudon, Rilke was exhausted, both by the quantity of things on display and by their snow-bright whiteness – so dazzling that it hurt his eyes. Speculating on the origins of Rodin’s own sense of vocation Rilke wondered about the antiquities he must have seen as a youth, in the Louvre and elsewhere: ‘There were stones asleep, and one felt that they would awaken at some Judgement Day, stones which had nothing mortal about them, and others embodying a movement, a gesture, which had retained such freshness that it seemed to be preserved here only until some passing child should receive it one day as a gift.’ Rodin himself, in Cathedrals of France, voiced his belief in sculpture as an ‘incantation by which the soul is brought down into the stone’. Looking at the work of Gothic carvers he was amazed ‘that one should be able to capture the soul’s reality in stone and imprison it for centuries’. Sometimes, Rodin said, a knot of wood or a block of marble made it seem ‘that a figure was already enclosed there and my work consisted of breaking off all the rough stone that hid it from me’. On the base of the bronze cast of Je Suis Belle he had inscribed lines from another poet, Baudelaire, beginning: ‘I am beautiful as a dream of stone.’
As can be seen from this rag-bag of quotations, the relation between these linked ideas is not fixed – not set in stone, as it were. There is a fluid and supple movement between the idea of the stone imprisoning and containing, of its sleeping and dreaming, of its waking and coming back to life. The stone contains the figure and the figure released from the stone imprisons the living being contained within it. The task of Rilke’s words – both in his own poetry and in his book on Rodin – was to record this simultaneous sense of deeper and deeper recesses of oneiric inwardness within the stillness of the stone, and of constant awakening, of emerging into being. The process is additionally complicated by the way that Rodin – unlike Michelangelo, who also spoke of freeing figures from stone – did no carving. He was a modeller, forming clay figures with his hands. From the moulds derived from these clay figures plaster versions could be cast; from the plaster figures other moulds could be made, from which a bronze casting might eventually be made. (All the marble versions of Rodin’s work were carved by assistants.) There is, in other words, a succession of confinings and freeings, of imprisonment and release, of positives and negatives; a constant inverting of the idea of inside and out, of exterior and interior. As Rilke succinctly phrased it, ‘surroundings must be found within’.
Rilke’s sense of the importance of what he was experiencing in the course of his immersion in Rodin’s work was intense and immediate. So much so that he hinted at how it might appear in retrospect, in the poem ‘Memory’ (published, like ‘The Song of the Statue’, in the second, 1906, edition of The Book of Images).
And you wait, you wait for the one thing
that will infinitely increase your life;
the mighty, the tremendous thing,
the awakening of stones,
depths turned to face you.
On bookshelves, volumes gleam
in gold and brown;
and you think of lands travelled through,
of pictures, of the dresses
of women lost once more.
And all of a sudden you know: that was it.
You rise, and there before you stand
the fear and form and prayer
of a year gone by.
The idea of the past imagined as a future, of the long-anticipated having already occurred, reflects, in temporal terms, the sense – inherent in Rodin’s method of working – of the outside within, of surface being formed within the depths of something else. Rilke came back to this repeatedly: ‘the mobility of the gestures … takes place within the things, like the circulation of an inner current’. Describing Rodin’s technique he wrote, ‘Slowly, exploringly he had moved from within outwards to its surface, and now a hand from without stretched forward and measured and limited this surface as exactly from without as from within.’ William Tucker, in his book The Language of Sculpture, summarises Rilke’s observations in terms of ‘the identity of external event with internal force: clay is felt as substance, not over the surface but through every cubic inch of volume’.
These reconciled oppositions – as essential to Rilke’s ongoing metaphysical project as they are to Rodin’s physical objects – can be seen operating in another way too. Rodin, according to Rilke, saw better than anybody that the beauty of men, animals and things was ‘endangered by time and circumstances’. Seeking to preserve this threatened beauty he adapted his things ‘to the less imperilled, quieter and more eternal world of space’. As Rodin’s career proceeded so the relation of the work to what surrounded it changed; ‘whereas formerly his works stood in the midst of space, it now seemed as if space snatched them to itself’. What is going on in the depths of the figures is being sucked to the surface. Hence the intense gestural drama of Rodin’s work, the sense of the surface brimming with what is within.
Rilke’s discussion of how Rodin adapted the temporally transient to the permanence of space intersects, at this point, with Berger’s. Berger, it will be recalled, began by contrasting the relations to space of tree and sculpture but for Rodin the distinction was not as clear-cut. In Cathedrals of France he declares that ‘between trees and stones [he sees] a kinship’, that his sense of sculpture owes much to trees and forests: ‘Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees …’
It so happens that a poem of Rilke’s about a tree expresses very clearly the dialectic of surface and depth, of inwardness and outwardness, that is so crucial to Rodin’s art. To be strictly accurate it is not just the poem itself but the way I encountered it that makes it so pertinent. (Contingency and serendipity play their part in this journey. What is an account of a journey, after all, if not an organised succession of contingencies?) I first read the poem – written, originally, in French – in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. The lines ‘Arbre toujours au milieu / De tout de qui l’entoure’ are here translated as ‘Tree always in the centre / Of all that surrounds it’. Curious to see what these French poems of Rilke’s were like, I bought The Complete French Poems, which presents the original French in tandem with an English translation. In this version the meaning of the passage from ‘Le Noyer’ (‘Walnut Tree’) is reversed:
Tree, ever at the centre
Of whatever it surrounds …
This is clearly wrong – nonsensical, even – but the combination of these two versions accords with Rodin’s method of working, the way the figures are always at the centre of whatever surrounds them and are always surrounding whatever is at their centre.
As with sculpture so with photographs … The first thing I read about photography was by John Berger. I became interested in reading about photography before I became interested in looking at photographs themselves. Years later, when I became interested in photographs of sculpture, two tributaries joined together, urging me more powerfully in the direction of Rodin (it is appropriate, given the inversion of surface and depth, that the metaphor here tends towards the mouth when I mean the source).
One of the earliest uses of photography was to make visual records of works of art. With the technology not yet responsive to the full range of colours sculpture lent itself more readily to this undertaking than painting. The writer James Hall thinks that ‘Louis Daguerre’s first relatively permanent photograph was probably a still-life with plaster casts’. In ‘Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing’ (1839), William Henry Fox Talbot outlined one of the uses to which he intended to put his ‘invention’, namely ‘the copying of statues and bas-reliefs … I have not pursued this branch of the subject to any extent; but I expect interesting results from it, and that it may be usefully employed under many circumstances.’