Rodin chose his beautiful fine art models with utmost care and loving and made them as much of the process of creation as of the creation itself. In an intimate conversation with Paul GSell, Rodin expanded on his views of the beauty of woman & what his soul perceived upon those visuals.
Rodin used to record the diverse rhythms of the human body on paper, observing the body from different heights, even from a step ladder on occasions. Although in the beginning Rodin used to deliberate on poses and instruct models accordingly, later on these poses were spontaneous, adopted by the models themselves without premeditation.
During the conversation, Rodin lamented on various drawings and how much the beauty was missed out in the conversion. The curve of the shoulders, the adorable swellings of the hips, the undulations of the hips & the architecture of the muscles showing through the skin. His deep knowledge of the human anatomy with his careful eye for the exterior of objects and bodies.
As if he was going back & reminiscing the time with the models, Rodin would say:
This is a curve of perfect beauty! […] It has an almost unreal grace! […] I will not say that woman is like a landscape that is constantly modified by the position of the sun, but the comparison is almost right.
[…] the sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface, soul, love, passion life, sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes.
Rodin in conversations with Paul GSell
Time changes everything. Rodin was mindful of the fact that young models, whose vigor evoked both pride and a call to love, lasted only for a few months. As the girl matures into a woman, deformations caused by child-bearing, fatigue caused by desire and the fever caused by passion rapidly slakes the tissues & relaxes the strong lines that are so much sought after in any model by any fine artists, though he also mentions the existence of another subtle type of beauty in that age, though not as pure or innocent.
Among the most famous of Rodin’s models were Camille Claudel & Gwen John, and both had passionate relationship with Rodin. Rodin’s personal charm & fame also brought a lot of the beautiful models, many of who were artists themselves, to him.
Rose Beuret, who was introduced to Rodin as a seamstress & after an extremely long love affair they finally married. At a later stage when Rodin started to sculpt more of his erotic perceptions of the human body, Isadora Duncan, who was also a dancer by profession, did a lot of modelling for Rodin and often involved students from her class in that process. From time to time, various people from high social status also modeled for Rodin, among them was Eve Fairfax.
Although Rodin loved the perfection of Greek physique and anatomy, he had also spent a lot of his time studying the Japanese actress Hanako, whose real name is Ohta Hisa. In conversation Rodin mentioned his curiosity & finding that Hanako’s anatomy was significantly different from other European women, with absolutely no-fat and muscles that project out like “little dogs called fox terriers”.
To Rodin, his models represented beauty, expression & character that evoked strength, grace, balance & being the mirror of the soul. His conversation in this Opium of Art series reveals his most intimate thought on new artists in this last quote.
The artists then had eyes to see whereas they are blind. Here is all the difference. The Greek women were beautiful, but their beauty resided above all in the mind of the sculptors who represented them.
In the union of the beautiful & the ugly, it is always beauty that triumphs. Nature, by divine law, constantly returns to the best, incessantly tends to the perfect. […] What we adore in a human body, even more than its beautiful shape, is the interior flame that makes it transparent.
François-Auguste-René Rodin in conversation with Paul Gsell