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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 2015-4727B.
“There is nothing in nature that has more character than the human body. It evokes through its strength or its grace the most varied images. The human body curved back is like a spring, like a beautiful bow from which Eros aims his invisible arrows” (quoted in A. Elsen, op. cit.., 2003, p. 561).
So Rodin told his protégé Paul Gsell in 1911, the year after he exhibited this exquisite, arched torso, along with a companion piece entitled La Prière, at the Paris Salon. “These two torsos were Rodin’s last great works,” Antoinette Le Normand-Romain has declared (op. cit., 2007, p. 617). The sculptor’s long meditations on ancient fragments had convinced him by this time that beauty and perfection could be found in the part or morceau–here, in the sensuous plenitude of the proffered breast. “Look at this thorax which rises while lifting the breasts, these ribs which project and swerve,” wrote the critic Henri Bidou in his review of the Salon. “This chest swells with air, as in the last moment of inhaling. The diaphragm lifted, the two flanks become hollow. This abdomen, caught in the movement of the thorax, is itself full and round. All that remains is a living, swelling body, that carries to pure air the rhythm of its life: an admirable piece of analysis. The refinement of the most complex fitting together of planes is combined with the exactitude of a captured momentary movement” (quoted in A. Elsen, op. cit., 2003, p. 561).
This life-sized Torse is most likely an enlargement of part of a small sculpture known as Damnée foudroyée (Thunderstruck Damned Woman), representing a female figure lying face-up on a rocky mound, which Rodin modeled around 1885 in conjunction with his great Porte de l’enfer (A. Le Normand-Romain, op. cit., 2007, p. 691; contra A. Elsen, op. cit., 2003, p. 559, who identifies the source as the upright Psyche of 1886). The quasi-fins or winglets that protrude from the hips of Torse are the remains of the hands of the earlier sculpture, which rested at the sides; Rodin intentionally retained these, balancing the newly truncated upper arms as well as underscoring the powerfully abstract qualities of the fragmentary figure. “Rodin’s capacity to see his sculptures both as human beings and as abstract forms is most telling in Torso of a Young Woman,” Albert Elsen has written (ibid., p. 561).
For Rodin, total abstraction would have been anathema: “If, in seeking simplicity, one neglects to indicate–or even if one suppresses–the details which give the sensation of life, the figure will remain stiff,” he explained. “If simplification is obtained through the exact rendering of the contours, the figure will be beautiful; simplicity will result from truth” (quoted in ibid., p. 563). Yet with Torse de jeune femme cambrée, he came as close to abstraction as he ever would, paving the way for the highly distilled, minimalist torsos of Brancusi, Archipenko, and Zadkine. The broad, amplified planes of the inflated chest cage allow light to play freely over the sculpture, while the audaciously truncated form represents a new, wholly nontraditional model of artistic finish and completeness.
“My joy was immense, and so was my enthusiasm,” Jacques Lipchitz wrote after visiting the newly opened Musée Rodin in 1919. “These figures without arms, heads and legs were endowed with a sense of mystery, and one needed imagination to complete the figure. I clearly saw that what Rodin was doing instinctively was not so different than what we, the cubists, were doing in a more intellectual way, and that at certain points it was even more complex” (quoted in ibid., p. 563).
“There is nothing in nature that has more character than the human body. It evokes through its strength or its grace the most varied images. The human body curved back is like a spring, like a beautiful bow from which Eros aims his invisible arrows” (quoted in A. Elsen, op. cit.., 2003, p. 561).
So Rodin told his protégé Paul Gsell in 1911, the year after he exhibited this exquisite, arched torso, along with a companion piece entitled La Prière, at the Paris Salon. “These two torsos were Rodin’s last great works,” Antoinette Le Normand-Romain has declared (op. cit., 2007, p. 617). The sculptor’s long meditations on ancient fragments had convinced him by this time that beauty and perfection could be found in the part or morceau–here, in the sensuous plenitude of the proffered breast. “Look at this thorax which rises while lifting the breasts, these ribs which project and swerve,” wrote the critic Henri Bidou in his review of the Salon. “This chest swells with air, as in the last moment of inhaling. The diaphragm lifted, the two flanks become hollow. This abdomen, caught in the movement of the thorax, is itself full and round. All that remains is a living, swelling body, that carries to pure air the rhythm of its life: an admirable piece of analysis. The refinement of the most complex fitting together of planes is combined with the exactitude of a captured momentary movement” (quoted in A. Elsen, op. cit., 2003, p. 561).
This life-sized Torse is most likely an enlargement of part of a small sculpture known as Damnée foudroyée (Thunderstruck Damned Woman), representing a female figure lying face-up on a rocky mound, which Rodin modeled around 1885 in conjunction with his great Porte de l’enfer (A. Le Normand-Romain, op. cit., 2007, p. 691; contra A. Elsen, op. cit., 2003, p. 559, who identifies the source as the upright Psyche of 1886). The quasi-fins or winglets that protrude from the hips of Torse are the remains of the hands of the earlier sculpture, which rested at the sides; Rodin intentionally retained these, balancing the newly truncated upper arms as well as underscoring the powerfully abstract qualities of the fragmentary figure. “Rodin’s capacity to see his sculptures both as human beings and as abstract forms is most telling in Torso of a Young Woman,” Albert Elsen has written (ibid., p. 561).
For Rodin, total abstraction would have been anathema: “If, in seeking simplicity, one neglects to indicate–or even if one suppresses–the details which give the sensation of life, the figure will remain stiff,” he explained. “If simplification is obtained through the exact rendering of the contours, the figure will be beautiful; simplicity will result from truth” (quoted in ibid., p. 563). Yet with Torse de jeune femme cambrée, he came as close to abstraction as he ever would, paving the way for the highly distilled, minimalist torsos of Brancusi, Archipenko, and Zadkine. The broad, amplified planes of the inflated chest cage allow light to play freely over the sculpture, while the audaciously truncated form represents a new, wholly nontraditional model of artistic finish and completeness.
“My joy was immense, and so was my enthusiasm,” Jacques Lipchitz wrote after visiting the newly opened Musée Rodin in 1919. “These figures without arms, heads and legs were endowed with a sense of mystery, and one needed imagination to complete the figure. I clearly saw that what Rodin was doing instinctively was not so different than what we, the cubists, were doing in a more intellectual way, and that at certain points it was even more complex” (quoted in ibid., p. 563).