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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 2018-5860B.
To Rodin, hands communicated as forcefully as the human face. His independent sculptures of hands are portraits of emotions. This emphatically modeled, dramatically gesturing hand—that both seeks and draws away, that clenches but cannot grasp—is one of Rodin’s most compelling depictions of powerless despair. The present sculpture was considered by Rodin to be a work in its own right, and a cast from the edition was exhibited during the artist’s lifetime. The photographer Eugène Druet took thirty images of Main crispée droite, which were presented together with the plaster in an exhibition in 1900 in Paris (figs. 1 and 2).
When reproached for only showing “simple parts of the human body,” Rodin defended the expressive force of the partial figure: “Those people,” he said, “didn’t they understand anything about sculpture? About study? Don’t they think that an artist has to apply himself to giving as much expression to a hand or a torso as to a face? And that he is logical and far more of an artist to exhibit an arm rather than a ‘bust’ arbitrarily deprived by tradition of its arms, legs and abdomen? Expression and proportion are the goals. Modelling is the means: it’s through modelling that flesh lives, vibrates, struggles and suffers…” (quoted in D. Viéville, Rodin et Freud: Collectionneurs, La passion à l'oeuvre, Paris, 2008, p. 165).
To Rodin, hands communicated as forcefully as the human face. His independent sculptures of hands are portraits of emotions. This emphatically modeled, dramatically gesturing hand—that both seeks and draws away, that clenches but cannot grasp—is one of Rodin’s most compelling depictions of powerless despair. The present sculpture was considered by Rodin to be a work in its own right, and a cast from the edition was exhibited during the artist’s lifetime. The photographer Eugène Druet took thirty images of Main crispée droite, which were presented together with the plaster in an exhibition in 1900 in Paris (figs. 1 and 2).
When reproached for only showing “simple parts of the human body,” Rodin defended the expressive force of the partial figure: “Those people,” he said, “didn’t they understand anything about sculpture? About study? Don’t they think that an artist has to apply himself to giving as much expression to a hand or a torso as to a face? And that he is logical and far more of an artist to exhibit an arm rather than a ‘bust’ arbitrarily deprived by tradition of its arms, legs and abdomen? Expression and proportion are the goals. Modelling is the means: it’s through modelling that flesh lives, vibrates, struggles and suffers…” (quoted in D. Viéville, Rodin et Freud: Collectionneurs, La passion à l'oeuvre, Paris, 2008, p. 165).