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I’ve never been directly interested in Rodin, but so many other interests have drawn me to him that he feels, in some ways, a source to which I have been insistently urged. Can an account of the journey towards it serve as a surrogate description of the source itself?

I first read about Rodin in Art and Revolution, John Berger’s book about the Soviet sculptor Ernst Neizvestny. Rodin was an important influence on Neizvestny but before discussing the work of either man Berger offers a general consideration of sculpture’s relation to space.

‘Compare a sculpture with a tree in winter. Because a tree grows, its forms are changeable and this is implicit in their shapes and configuration. As a result its relation to the surrounding space appears to be an adaptive one.’ Berger then compares a sculpture with a building and a machine. Having done that, he is ready to specify the way a sculpture ‘appears to be totally opposed to the space that surrounds it. Its frontiers with that space are definitive. Its only function is to use space in such a way that it confers meaning upon it. It does not move or become relative. In every way possible it emphasizes its own finiteness. And by so doing it invokes the notion of infinity and challenges it.

‘We, perceiving this total opposition between the sculpture and the surrounding space, translate its promise into terms of time. It will stand against time as it stands against space.’

From that point on I was conscious of and curious about sculpture – if only in a vague and passive way.

* * *

I next encountered Rodin in connection with Rilke, who had arrived in Paris in 1902 to write a monograph on the sculptor. ‘I am coming to Paris this autumn to see you and steep myself in your creations,’ he announced to Rodin in June of that year. In spite of the language barrier – Rilke’s French at that time was poor and Rodin had no German – the young poet was as impressed by the master, when he met him, as he was enthralled by his creations. Rilke spent a good deal of time in Rodin’s company, wrote his book about him in a month, and resumed his peripatetic life the following March. Rodin showed little interest in the book but when he read a French translation, in 1905, he wrote warmly to the man who had ‘influenced so many by his work and his talent’. Expressing affection and admiration, Rodin invited Rilke to stay at his home in Meudon. The reunion, a few months later, was everything that Rilke could have hoped for. He found himself not only integrated into Rodin’s busy round of activities and obligations but helping to organise them. It was a logical next step – or, perhaps, a temptingly illogical one – for the poet to become the sculptor’s secretary. The arrangement worked well enough for a while but Rilke soon began to feel over-burdened by his duties. In May 1906 Rodin discovered that the secretary had become over-familiar in letters to some of his friends – and sacked him on the spot (‘like a thieving servant’, as the grievously wounded Rilke put it).

I read Rilke’s book ten years ago, not because of who it was about, but because of who it was by. Actually, the distinction crumbles even as it is made since this unique account of genius by a genius, as Rilke himself told Lou Andreas-Salomé, ‘also speaks about me’. If this became even more evident after it was written that is because Rilke’s early exposure to Rodin had such a determining effect on his subsequent career. From Rodin he became convinced of the absolute importance of incessant work, of unswerving dedication to a vocation. It was Rodin, apparently, who advised him to ‘just go and look at something – for example, at an animal in the Jardin des Plantes, and keep on looking at it till you’re able to make a poem of that’. ‘The Panther’ may have been the direct result of this suggestion. More generally, Rilke fought to directly translate what he considered the sculptor’s most distinct quality – his ability to create things – into ‘thing-poems’ (Dinggedicht). This entailed more than just looking; as with Rodin, ‘one might almost say the appearance of his things does not concern him: so much does he experience their being’.

The way that Rodin awakened in Rilke the desire to create poems that were the verbal equivalents of sculptures is quite explicit. ‘The Song of the Statue’, for example, records a longing to

be brought back from stone

into life, into life redeemed.

On his very first visit to Rodin’s studio on rue de l’Université Rilke was struck by a bas-relief called Morning Star. ‘A young girl’s head with a wonderfully clear brow, clear, sweet, light, and simple, and deep down in the stone a hand emerges, shielding the eyes of a man, waking, from the brightness. These eyes are almost in the stone (so marvellously is the unawakenedness expressed here …)’ The following day, on his first visit to the pavilion at Meudon, Rilke was exhausted, both by the quantity of things on display and by their snow-bright whiteness – so dazzling that it hurt his eyes. Speculating on the origins of Rodin’s own sense of vocation Rilke wondered about the antiquities he must have seen as a youth, in the Louvre and elsewhere: ‘There were stones asleep, and one felt that they would awaken at some Judgement Day, stones which had nothing mortal about them, and others embodying a movement, a gesture, which had retained such freshness that it seemed to be preserved here only until some passing child should receive it one day as a gift.’ Rodin himself, in Cathedrals of France, voiced his belief in sculpture as an ‘incantation by which the soul is brought down into the stone’. Looking at the work of Gothic carvers he was amazed ‘that one should be able to capture the soul’s reality in stone and imprison it for centuries’. Sometimes, Rodin said, a knot of wood or a block of marble made it seem ‘that a figure was already enclosed there and my work consisted of breaking off all the rough stone that hid it from me’. On the base of the bronze cast of Je Suis Belle he had inscribed lines from another poet, Baudelaire, beginning: ‘I am beautiful as a dream of stone.’

As can be seen from this rag-bag of quotations, the relation between these linked ideas is not fixed – not set in stone, as it were. There is a fluid and supple movement between the idea of the stone imprisoning and containing, of its sleeping and dreaming, of its waking and coming back to life. The stone contains the figure and the figure released from the stone imprisons the living being contained within it. The task of Rilke’s words – both in his own poetry and in his book on Rodin – was to record this simultaneous sense of deeper and deeper recesses of oneiric inwardness within the stillness of the stone, and of constant awakening, of emerging into being. The process is additionally complicated by the way that Rodin – unlike Michelangelo, who also spoke of freeing figures from stone – did no carving. He was a modeller, forming clay figures with his hands. From the moulds derived from these clay figures plaster versions could be cast; from the plaster figures other moulds could be made, from which a bronze casting might eventually be made. (All the marble versions of Rodin’s work were carved by assistants.) There is, in other words, a succession of confinings and freeings, of imprisonment and release, of positives and negatives; a constant inverting of the idea of inside and out, of exterior and interior. As Rilke succinctly phrased it, ‘surroundings must be found within’.

Rilke’s sense of the importance of what he was experiencing in the course of his immersion in Rodin’s work was intense and immediate. So much so that he hinted at how it might appear in retrospect, in the poem ‘Memory’ (published, like ‘The Song of the Statue’, in the second, 1906, edition of The Book of Images).

And you wait, you wait for the one thing

that will infinitely increase your life;

the mighty, the tremendous thing,

the awakening of stones,

depths turned to face you.

On bookshelves, volumes gleam

in gold and brown;

and you think of lands travelled through,

of pictures, of the dresses

of women lost once more.

And all of a sudden you know: that was it.

You rise, and there before you stand

the fear and form and prayer

of a year gone by.

The idea of the past imagined as a future, of the long-anticipated having already occurred, reflects, in temporal terms, the sense – inherent in Rodin’s method of working – of the outside within, of surface being formed within the depths of something else. Rilke came back to this repeatedly: ‘the mobility of the gestures … takes place within the things, like the circulation of an inner current’. Describing Rodin’s technique he wrote, ‘Slowly, exploringly he had moved from within outwards to its surface, and now a hand from without stretched forward and measured and limited this surface as exactly from without as from within.’ William Tucker, in his book The Language of Sculpture, summarises Rilke’s observations in terms of ‘the identity of external event with internal force: clay is felt as substance, not over the surface but through every cubic inch of volume’.

These reconciled oppositions – as essential to Rilke’s ongoing metaphysical project as they are to Rodin’s physical objects – can be seen operating in another way too. Rodin, according to Rilke, saw better than anybody that the beauty of men, animals and things was ‘endangered by time and circumstances’. Seeking to preserve this threatened beauty he adapted his things ‘to the less imperilled, quieter and more eternal world of space’. As Rodin’s career proceeded so the relation of the work to what surrounded it changed; ‘whereas formerly his works stood in the midst of space, it now seemed as if space snatched them to itself’. What is going on in the depths of the figures is being sucked to the surface. Hence the intense gestural drama of Rodin’s work, the sense of the surface brimming with what is within.

Rilke’s discussion of how Rodin adapted the temporally transient to the permanence of space intersects, at this point, with Berger’s. Berger, it will be recalled, began by contrasting the relations to space of tree and sculpture but for Rodin the distinction was not as clear-cut. In Cathedrals of France he declares that ‘between trees and stones [he sees] a kinship’, that his sense of sculpture owes much to trees and forests: ‘Where did I learn to understand sculpture? In the woods by looking at the trees …’

It so happens that a poem of Rilke’s about a tree expresses very clearly the dialectic of surface and depth, of inwardness and outwardness, that is so crucial to Rodin’s art. To be strictly accurate it is not just the poem itself but the way I encountered it that makes it so pertinent. (Contingency and serendipity play their part in this journey. What is an account of a journey, after all, if not an organised succession of contingencies?) I first read the poem – written, originally, in French – in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. The lines ‘Arbre toujours au milieu / De tout de qui l’entoure’ are here translated as ‘Tree always in the centre / Of all that surrounds it’. Curious to see what these French poems of Rilke’s were like, I bought The Complete French Poems, which presents the original French in tandem with an English translation. In this version the meaning of the passage from ‘Le Noyer’ (‘Walnut Tree’) is reversed:

Tree, ever at the centre

Of whatever it surrounds …

This is clearly wrong – nonsensical, even – but the combination of these two versions accords with Rodin’s method of working, the way the figures are always at the centre of whatever surrounds them and are always surrounding whatever is at their centre.

As with sculpture so with photographs … The first thing I read about photography was by John Berger. I became interested in reading about photography before I became interested in looking at photographs themselves. Years later, when I became interested in photographs of sculpture, two tributaries joined together, urging me more powerfully in the direction of Rodin (it is appropriate, given the inversion of surface and depth, that the metaphor here tends towards the mouth when I mean the source).

One of the earliest uses of photography was to make visual records of works of art. With the technology not yet responsive to the full range of colours sculpture lent itself more readily to this undertaking than painting. The writer James Hall thinks that ‘Louis Daguerre’s first relatively permanent photograph was probably a still-life with plaster casts’. In ‘Some Account of the Art of Photogenic Drawing’ (1839), William Henry Fox Talbot outlined one of the uses to which he intended to put his ‘invention’, namely ‘the copying of statues and bas-reliefs … I have not pursued this branch of the subject to any extent; but I expect interesting results from it, and that it may be usefully employed under many circumstances.’ Five years later, in The Pencil of Nature, his picture of a bust of Patroclus offered abundant proof that ‘statues, busts, and other specimens of sculpture, are generally well represented by the Photographic Art’.

So well that David Finn – to leap forward a century and a half – was able to persuade Kenneth Clark and Mario Praz that photographs of sculpture could enable people ‘to discover qualities in a work of art that might not be immediately apparent even to a knowledgeable and critical viewer’. Finn also suggests that whereas photographs of complete sculptures often reveal stylistic traits or conventions which date the work and distract the viewer, photos like his (which, typically, isolate parts of a larger whole) reveal what is elemental, timeless. By doing so, by freeing them from the grip of convention and the period in which they were made, the stones are brought to life.

When it comes to photographing the works of Rodin this strategy is both appropriate and, in a sense, superfluous, because the sculptor himself often concentrated on parts of the body. If the fragment is, as Linda Nochlin suggests, ‘a metaphor of modernity’, then Rodin’s eagerness to exhibit dismembered body parts as completed works of art is one of the ways in which the twentieth century can be felt beckoning in the nineteenth. This is not the only congruity between photography and Rodin’s working methods.

In her contentious essay ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’, Rosalind Krauss points out that, like Cartier-Bresson, ‘who never printed his own photographs, Rodin’s relation to the casting of his own sculpture could only be called remote’. The fact that the plasters are themselves casts – i.e. ‘potential multiples’ – illustrates how deeply Rodin’s method was steeped ‘in the ethos of mechanical reproduction’. The same figures recur endlessly, in new contexts, in new permutations, in new arrangements, in new sizes, in new materials. Many of these figures were first glimpsed in the molten swirl of The Gates of Hell (which Rodin referred to as his ‘Noah’s ark’); since the monument was never cast in the sculptor’s lifetime – and thus, in a sense, never completed – Krauss views Rodin’s as ‘an art of reproduction, of multiples without originals’.

Needless to say, any equation of his art with the camera’s capacity for copying or passive recording would have enraged Rodin in the same way that allegations that his Age of Bronze was cast from life had done in 1877: ‘Many cast from nature, that is to say, replace an art work with a photograph. It is quick but it is not art.’ Resolutely insisting that ‘it is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies’, Rodin made clear his distaste for photography on many occasions. He was scarcely less obstinate in his aversions as an observer than he was as creator:

Photographs of monuments are mute for me. They do not move me; they allow me to see nothing. Because they do not properly reproduce the planes, photographs are for me always of an unendurable dryness and hardness. The lens of the camera, like the eye, sees in low relief. Whereas, looking at these stones, I feel them! My gaze touches them everywhere as I move about to see from all sides how they soar in every direction under the heaven and from all sides I search out their secret.

In spite of these specific and generalised objections Rodin, especially from the mid-1890s onwards, took advantage of the full range of opportunities afforded by photography. He used photos as tools to revise and edit his works in progress, indicating in pen changes to be made later to the figures themselves. He included photographs of his sculptures in exhibitions. Alert to their value in making his work available in another, easily disseminated form, he used photographs to publicise, enhance and spread his reputation, to help the idea of his matchless originality to proliferate. After seeing the Rodin exhibition at London’s Hayward Gallery in 1986, Anthony Barnett even went so far as to suggest not only that ‘the photographic images may often have a stronger presence than the actual works’, but that Rodin ‘may often have consciously sought for an effect that was aimed at the two-dimensional mass-reproduction of his work, rather than its three-dimensional solitude’.

Rodin did not take photographs himself, preferring to rely on the skills of a small but changing group of skilled and trusted collaborators. The most important of these was Edward Steichen, who achieved in photography the equivalent of what Rilke managed in prose: a supremely individualised account in which the work and the man who made it were perfectly mirrored. Steichen’s composite image of Rodin silhouetted in front of The Thinker and the Monument to Victor Hugo (1902) and the brooding long exposures of the Balzac monument at night (1908) captured the sculptor’s imagination in a way that he had not previously believed possible. In person Rodin was, by all accounts, a modest man; at the deepest level, though, the test of photography – its greatest challenge, in fact – was whether it could do justice to his genius. On seeing Steichen’s Balzac prints Rodin was immediately convinced, informing him that he would ‘make the world understand my Balzac through these pictures. They are like Christ walking in the desert.’ Rodin’s enthusiasm for Steichen – ‘Before him nothing conclusive had been achieved’ – was such that it caused him profoundly to re-consider the value of photography, which, he conceded in 1908, ‘can create works of art’. The collaboration was mutually beneficial to sculptor and photographer alike. Of the portrait of Rodin and The Thinker, Steichen recalled that it was ‘undoubtedly the image that launched me in the photographic world’.

I approached Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s photographs not with Rodin’s magisterial scepticism but with a degree of impatience. There were other things I was supposed to be doing, other things I was meant to be looking at, and I hoped that they would not detain me, that I could look at them quickly. These hopes were accurate and wide of the mark in that it took only a brief look for any desire to move on to be immediately extinguished. Although I didn’t realise it at the time the reason for this was, perhaps, that these pictures had brought me so close to the source, to Rodin himself. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. Rilke had been dazzled by the snow-bright whiteness of Rodin’s work; Gough-Cooper subtly reminds us that white is itself a colour, endlessly susceptible to changes of angle and light. At times it can even seem – how else to put it? – flesh-coloured.