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Defy the influential master!

Cézanne

‘Don’t moisten too much,’ Auguste Rodin told Julius Fetherstone, a little surprised at his student’s uncharacteristic ineptitude, ‘use your finger to check.’ The great master had been slightly perturbed that today, his English protégé seemed fractious, distracted. He had therefore given Julius the simple task of moistening the clay maquettes so they did not dry out and crack. But he observed that the young artist sponged and sloshed the slip as if he was bathing a horse. Rodin suggested Julius stop. That he sketch.

‘Don’t want to sketch,’ Julius said defensively.

‘Take over from Pierre and continue the carving of The Kiss,’ Rodin instructed. Such an exacting task was also an honour – to allow the young Englishman time with the master’s current work. The marble was in another studio. By itself. Away from Rodin. An ante-room away from the other students. Away from the six models, of both sexes, moving naked around the studio so that whenever a sculptor turned and wherever his gaze fell he was confronted by the human form and the play of light upon it.

‘“Love led us to a single death”,’ Rodin quoted as he walked his young student around The Kiss.

‘Paolo and Francesca,’ Julius elaborated, wanting to impress his master that he had read Dante’s Inferno and knew the story. ‘Paolo’s brother goes to war entrusting the welfare of his wife to him. Paolo and Francesca fall in love and have an affair. Hell is their reward.’ Rodin nodded sagely. ‘Tell me that it is only in the arts that love could lead to eternal damnation,’ Julius pleaded privately under his breath. Rodin, who at once now understood the provenance of his student’s malady, decided it wise not to comment. He left the room, encouraging Julius to imagine he was stroking the skin of the figures to define their form, rather than carving into marble to reveal it.

Which is precisely what Julius did – and did very well – for an hour.

Then he left the ante-room and returned to the main studio as if in a trance, not seeming to notice that his master was regarding him quizzically and soon with irritation. In fact, Julius was not aware of any other person being in that studio. He scooped up an armful of terracotta clay, cradling it like a baby as he walked to the end of the room. There he sat down on the ground and laid the clay between his legs. He was sweating profusely. Panting. Little under an hour later, Julius suddenly growled, shouted, wailed, as if something was being wrenched from him. His body was twisted into spasm before collapsing and becoming as flimsy as rags. Rodin, quietly, ventured over. His young student looked up at him, tears silently streaming down his clay-smeared face. The great sculptor looked at what the young Englishman had created, had created in a frenzy, that tortured him so.

Two figures. About a foot high. Their bodies simultaneously flowing into each other like liquid but also bucked solid at the moment of sexual ecstasy. The redness of the clay accentuating the sense of flesh, blood and arousal.

‘Paolo and Francesca?’ Rodin asked carefully, not wishing to intrude on the intensity of personal experience that had so obviously consumed his student.

‘Yes,’ Julius replied. His voice was hoarse, not from the lie but from the exertion of wresting the form away from his soul and out into clay. Rodin told him to go, to rest for two days, not to visit the studio but to indulge himself with time, to work and create alone, slave only to what this inner inspiration was dictating.

‘I will keep your clay moist,’ Rodin assured him. And he would. For to see brilliance in one’s students is affirming for the teacher. A legacy. A testament. A lineage in the making. The future in safe hands. ‘I am the bridge between the past and the present,’ Rodin muttered at a naked young woman who smiled politely and wondered if she should tell the sculptor that pellets of terracotta clay clung to his great beard like berries to holly.

Oh, how I hunger for her. Never more. Never more. lam full. And yet I starve.

Julius bought a baguette and a hunk of ham. With his teeth, he ripped the bread as he walked to his apartment but his mouth was dry and the bread stuck in his throat.

She has sucked me dry. And yet creative juices overflow and threaten to consume me.

His master had told him not to work and yet Julius broke into a jog. Home, home, he had to be there now! As soon as he entered his apartment, he dropped his provisions on the floor, fell to his knees and, with white chalk, drew Cosima across the floorboards. Where she had been. This time yesterday. Stretched out. Enfolding him. Him in her. Where did he end and where did she begin? That was the point. There was no beginning; there could be no end. And yet it had ended between them. He had to abandon himself to this fact. He would do so willingly. To be enslaved by the memory of Cosima was a captivity he could only welcome, however torturous it might be. Pain is good. Salvation from despair. Growth and creation.

There was a knock at the door.

Cosima!

No. Of course not.

Oh shit!

Thursday.

Rent day.

It would be Madame Virenque who knocked.

This week, as last, Julius was penniless. Jacques Antoine would pay for the portrait bust of his fiancée only on delivery. A small advance had been given for materials. And spent. Oh God, still she knocks.

Julius opened the door. Madame Virenque raised an eyebrow. She saw the chalk drawing on the floorboards and her other eyebrow was raised.

‘You have money?’

‘Non, pardon, Madame.’

One eyebrow down, the other now cocked lasciviously.

Close your eyes, Julius. Imagine Cosima. Forget that your landlady’s breasts are pendulous, spongy; the skin akin to used crêpe paper. Remember instead the pertness of Cosima’s, the translucence of her skin, the blush of her nipples. Do not allow the more pungent smell of this woman to override your memory of Cosima’s sweet muskiness. If where you are dipping your cock now is slack, undefined, hold the base of your shaft and conjure the heat, the tightness of Cosima’s sex. Come quickly. If you come, she will go.

Cosima, Cosima. Oh God.

Madame Virenque was disappointed. Her eyebrows told him so. But still, she could not now argue for the rent. An orgasm for her was not a condition of the barter.

The orgasm for Julius emptied his mind as much as it emptied his testicles. The pall had lifted and he was thinking clearly.

‘I need money,’ he said to himself after she had gone, knowing too that he must eat, so he sat down to his ham and bread. ‘I will never fuck for lodgings again.’ He wanted to move. He needed money to do so. There was a substantial amount for the taking, merci beaucoup, Monsieur Antoine. ‘I must commence the portrait bust of his fiancée.’

That evening, Julius started his portrait of Cosima. Only it wasn’t Cosima – not that Jacques or their friends would know. Julius idealized her natural beauty, enhancing her features to create an exquisite face atop an elegant neck and a stunning décolletage. Of course, the result would so flatter Jacques Antoine that he would pay the sculptor gladly. And yet Julius could keep Cosima to himself.

‘A true sculptor works from the inside out,’ Julius said out loud when his wire armature was complete and his fingers throbbed, ‘even when you carve away at rock – when you work from the outside in, rather than when you model with clay and build up mass – it must be the essence of the subject which dictates the surface details.’ He turned the banding wheel slowly, staring hard through the wire mesh as it rotated before him. It was like a network of atoms, the most rudimentary step towards breathing life into sculpture. ‘And yet most people who look at sculpture see only the exterior. Just the periphery. The superficiality of the surface.’

By creating a portrait that was idealized, Julius knew he would be flattering Jacques Antoine’s vanity.

Julius took to his bed in the early hours, unwashed even though his hands were bloodied from torn fingernails and cuts from the wire. ‘My piece will have pride of place in their drawing room. And Jacques will present it to all those who enter. “See how beautiful is the woman who is my wife!” he will boast. “Did you ever see beauty more complete? How skilled is this young Fetherstone! Of course I will introduce you – I am sure he will sculpt your wife too.”’

Julius slept deeply, dreaming of his work in progress: the portrait bust, also his clay maquette. Wherever he was in dream-time, that writhing twist of terracotta was in sight. When he woke, he knew somehow how significant it was. How the work itself would dictate his future as much as his passion for Cosima.

As soon as it was light, Julius began to build muscle and tendon and bone and gristle aboard the armature with nuggets of clay. He worked all hours for two weeks; borrowing money from a rich student of Rodin’s to pay rent to Madame Virenque. The bust progressed. It was a virtuoso piece; emotion poured from the tilt of the face or the sweep of the forehead and even now the sculptor knew just how light would catch and suffuse the work once it was cast in bronze. When he carved the eyes and parted the lips and swirled the hair idealistically, then he knew he had hidden Cosima deep within the piece. He had her to himself. She would reappear, he knew she would, whenever he sculpted an anonymous female form again. And no one would know it but him. And ah! how he would know.

He felt a certain smugness knowing how he could con Jacques and his circle into believing that this idealized beauty in bronze was the spitting image of the woman herself. But they would be incapable of recognizing her in Abandon, or Eden, or Hunger, and all the related works that were already in embryo, propagating as rampantly as cells, in the mind of the sculptor.

They would not recognize her. But Julius would see her, possess her again, from this day forth whenever he carved a breast, modelled a pair of lips, shaped a waist, defined a buttock, the run of a stomach, the intimacy of an ear lobe. It would be her. Unmistakably. No one else would know, though. For they would be too caught up in surface details. They did not know her inside out.

This distortion, though slight, was enough to condition all those who saw the sculpture to reappraise the way they regarded and recalled Cosima. Her own face swiftly became that of the sculpted version to all who knew her. Thus, when Julius created his masterpiece, Abandon, no one recognized the female figure as Cosima though he had commanded all his power and dexterity as a sculptor to best describe the woman who had both liberated and destroyed him.

For the rest of his life, alongside pot-boiling portrait busts and garden sculpture, Julius Fetherstone devoted maquette after maquette and volumes of sketch-pads to the theme of Cosima and Abandon. He cast four versions in bronze. There is one in New York, at the Museum of Modern Art, another in Paris at the Musée d’Orsay. A late version was bought by Getty and is on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago. The remaining bronze is at the Neue Pinakotek in Munich.

Julius Fetherstone’s masterpiece, his magnum opus, the marble version of Abandon, exists now only in photographs. It has disappeared. Presumed stolen. It was at the artist’s studio around the time of his death in 1954 because it can be seen in the background of photographs chronicling the artist’s last weeks, bedridden in his studio surrounded by his work. There is scant documentation about Abandon, only Julius declaring to the great art historian Herbert Read that ‘within the rock, all my desires as a man and a sculptor were contained and released’.

Of what value are grainy, monochrome, two-dimensional records of something that was conceived and created to be experienced in the round?

A tease. Torture. A tragedy.