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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Auguste Rodin catalogue critique de l'oeuvre sculpté currently being prepared by the Comité Auguste Rodin at Galerie Brame et Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2015-4725B.
Rodin created L’homme qui marche–“in my opinion,” he later declared, “one of my best things”–around 1899 by combining a torso and a pair of legs that he had modeled two decades earlier in connection with his statue of Saint John the Baptist, a succès de scandale at the 1880 Salon. Rodin had re-discovered the clay torso, by then cracked and fissured like an ancient statue, in his studio in 1887 and had cast it in bronze as an autonomous sculpture, powerfully expressive in its fragmentary form. Now, he mounted the torso atop the forked legs, the juncture of the two pieces representing the very fulcrum of the body in motion. Stripping away all anecdote and rhetoric, Rodin achieved an expression of pure movement–the powerful forward stride of a seeker, a striver, a prophet, a visionary. “Absence of a head eliminated specific identity and psychological or emotional display, and being without arms as well, the figure totally lacked the means of traditional expression,” Albert Elsen has written. “The Walking Man strode into the twentieth century like a newborn” (op. cit., 2003, p. 553).
The idea for L’homme qui marche had come to Rodin when an Italian laborer named César Pignatelli arrived at his studio in 1878 to offer his services as a model. “The peasant undressed, mounted the model stand as if he had never posed; he planted himself head up, torso straight, at the same time supported on his two legs, open like a compass,” Rodin recalled. “The movement was so right, so determined, and so true that I cried: ‘But it’s a walking man!’” Although it represented a bold violation of academic tradition to balance a figure on both legs, with the torso above the void, Rodin was undeterred. “I promised myself then to model it with all my might, and to come close to nature, which is to say, to truth. It was thus that I made The Walking Man and John the Baptist” (ibid., p. 546).
By the time that Rodin modeled L’homme qui marche, he had been pondering his statue of Saint John for over twenty years and had clarified his ideas about the pose. Whereas the earlier figure is shown in perfect front view, the torso of L’homme qui marche leans forward and swivels slightly to the left, heightening the impression of motion. Rodin elongated the trailing leg and raised the rear section of the base so that it appeared from behind that the figure was still pushing off the ground. From the side, however, he suggested that the weight had already been transferred, thickening and tensing the muscles of the right thigh and flattening out those of the left. “The sculptor obliges the spectator to follow the development of an act through one figure,” Rodin explained. “He makes visible the passage of one pose into the other; he indicates how imperceptibly the first glides into the second” (ibid., pp. 547-549).
Rodin first exhibited L’homme qui marche on a two-meter column at his 1900 retrospective at the Pavilion d’Alma, and he selected the figure for prominent display at a banquet held in 1903 when he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. In 1907, he displayed a colossal enlargement of the figure at the Salon, where it made an enormous impact; recognizing the extent of its significance, he went on to show the sculpture at more than twenty international exhibitions before World War I. From Matisse’s Serf to Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space to Giacometti’s Homme qui marche, many of the century’s pioneering sculptural experiments would be unthinkable without the powerfully modern precedent of Rodin’s great striding figure.
Rodin created L’homme qui marche–“in my opinion,” he later declared, “one of my best things”–around 1899 by combining a torso and a pair of legs that he had modeled two decades earlier in connection with his statue of Saint John the Baptist, a succès de scandale at the 1880 Salon. Rodin had re-discovered the clay torso, by then cracked and fissured like an ancient statue, in his studio in 1887 and had cast it in bronze as an autonomous sculpture, powerfully expressive in its fragmentary form. Now, he mounted the torso atop the forked legs, the juncture of the two pieces representing the very fulcrum of the body in motion. Stripping away all anecdote and rhetoric, Rodin achieved an expression of pure movement–the powerful forward stride of a seeker, a striver, a prophet, a visionary. “Absence of a head eliminated specific identity and psychological or emotional display, and being without arms as well, the figure totally lacked the means of traditional expression,” Albert Elsen has written. “The Walking Man strode into the twentieth century like a newborn” (op. cit., 2003, p. 553).
The idea for L’homme qui marche had come to Rodin when an Italian laborer named César Pignatelli arrived at his studio in 1878 to offer his services as a model. “The peasant undressed, mounted the model stand as if he had never posed; he planted himself head up, torso straight, at the same time supported on his two legs, open like a compass,” Rodin recalled. “The movement was so right, so determined, and so true that I cried: ‘But it’s a walking man!’” Although it represented a bold violation of academic tradition to balance a figure on both legs, with the torso above the void, Rodin was undeterred. “I promised myself then to model it with all my might, and to come close to nature, which is to say, to truth. It was thus that I made The Walking Man and John the Baptist” (ibid., p. 546).
By the time that Rodin modeled L’homme qui marche, he had been pondering his statue of Saint John for over twenty years and had clarified his ideas about the pose. Whereas the earlier figure is shown in perfect front view, the torso of L’homme qui marche leans forward and swivels slightly to the left, heightening the impression of motion. Rodin elongated the trailing leg and raised the rear section of the base so that it appeared from behind that the figure was still pushing off the ground. From the side, however, he suggested that the weight had already been transferred, thickening and tensing the muscles of the right thigh and flattening out those of the left. “The sculptor obliges the spectator to follow the development of an act through one figure,” Rodin explained. “He makes visible the passage of one pose into the other; he indicates how imperceptibly the first glides into the second” (ibid., pp. 547-549).
Rodin first exhibited L’homme qui marche on a two-meter column at his 1900 retrospective at the Pavilion d’Alma, and he selected the figure for prominent display at a banquet held in 1903 when he was awarded the Légion d’Honneur. In 1907, he displayed a colossal enlargement of the figure at the Salon, where it made an enormous impact; recognizing the extent of its significance, he went on to show the sculpture at more than twenty international exhibitions before World War I. From Matisse’s Serf to Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space to Giacometti’s Homme qui marche, many of the century’s pioneering sculptural experiments would be unthinkable without the powerfully modern precedent of Rodin’s great striding figure.