"COMPLIMENTARY, ENTHUSIASTIC" : Rodin got his secretaries to stamp foreign press cuttings from the early twentieth century with these comments : a brief summing up of their reading of them or of an actual translation attached to the documents.
This concern for the image of his work and life as seen by the critics was constant.It was of course only when his first exhibitions were held, i.e. in Belgium, that Rodin could find his name in print ; at that time he cut articles out of the newspapers himself and stuck them into notebooks which were unfortunately broken up, probably in the inter-war period, so that they could be classified. As soon as he could afford to do so, i.e. when he was about forty, he subscribed to press-cuttings agencies such as Je Lis Tout or the Argus de la Presse, and this subscription was carried on by the Musée Rodin after the sculptor’s death.
His tendency to hoard things was certainly of longer standing, to judge by the documents kept from his early youth and those coming from family, and was of a dual nature : the sentimental and moral attachment to his roots, maintained in a Family held together by the difficulties of life, for whom nothing was superfluous, and his innate feeling for material heritage, whether in the form of individual property or the universal patrimony. He was to provide constant expressions of this feeling from the start of his life to its finish, first of all by preserving everything, from the letters he received to notes scribbled on scraps of paper, from draft accounts to the tiniest press cutting ; and secondly by fighting against those who destroyed or damaged the national heritage, whether soldiers or not, aIl of them Wreckers of the popular memory.
For anyone paying a fleeting visit to the Musée Rodin it is hard to bave any concept of what its archives and reserve stock were in 1917 and are today. It takes many years of familiarity with the p]ace, tenacity and analysis, one might even say archaeological excavation, to get some measure of the infinite richness of Rodin’s donation. Tens of thousands of handwritten and printed documents, books and periodicals counting out over seventy years of the artist’s life followed by eighty years of acquisitions by the Museum.
This plenitude of riches is cruelly marred by the absence of most of Rodin’s diaries which may have been purloined by his secretaries ; the ten or so that have been preserved, from late in life, disparate and partial as they. are, reflect their historical importance. Nor are there many posters relating to his exhibitions or other events. Apart from these specific gaps, the collection contains rare documents, rare because of the importance of their authors or simply the interest of their content. From the modest receipt to the great stream of letters, warm and friendly or strictly polite, commercial and political or purely administrative, the tens and thousands of handwritten documents preserved by Rodin - he kept everything quite unselectively - all leave some trace of incontrovertible historical signifiance. The whole of society and its workings are concentrated in them, from the doctor to the artist, from the minister to the society lady or mistress, from the workman to the sovereign. As well as letters there are also books, including a number with written dedications which are often valuable.
In this library - containing over 30,000 items dating from the sixteenth century to the present day - Rodin’s collection reveals both what he read and what he did no read ; for the pages of some works - which we are anxious to preserve as they are - have not been cut, except sometimes for the few pages where the sculptor’s name is mentioned. Apart from the evidence thus provided. Rodin was not capable of reading everything, as this dedication by Rainer Maria Rilke in Der Neuen Gedichte anderer Teil (Leipzig, 1908) demonstrates : “My finest efforts are enclosed in a language which is not yours. I give you this book which you will not read…”