THE MONUMENTS
Antoinette Le Normand-Romain

The bronze casts of the two principal monuments by Rodin, The Burghers of Calais and The Monument to Balzac, are exhibited in the garden of the Hôtel Biron.


The Monument
to the Burghers of Calais
The Monument to the Burghers of Calais
1889
bronze
217 x 255 x 177 cm
S.450
Photo : A. Rzepka

In 1347, following a particularly long siege, the city of Calais was obliged to surrender to Edward III, the King of England. Six burghers, Eustache de Saint-Pierre, Jean d'Aire, Jacques and Pierre de Wissant, Jean de Fiennes, Andrieu d'Andres, were willing to sacrifice their lives and accepted to hand over the keys of the city to the King. During the 19th century, there were several plans to erect a monument to honour the heroism of these citizens of Calais and to reaffirm the historical identity of the city.
Omer Dewavrin, mayor of Calais, relaunched the idea in 1884, and the city council signed a contract with Rodin in January 1885 to execute a monument. Drawing inspiration from the Chronicles by Froissart, the artist favoured the idea of presenting the group "in a slow procession towards death". The first maquette, presented to the Committee in November 1884 and unanimously approved, stood out from the other competitors who had submitted compositions in the traditional form of a pyramid, highlighting one single personage. "It is the subject itself which (...) imposes a heroic vision of all six figures being sacrificed to one single communicative expression and feeling. The pedestal is triumphal, it has the rudiments of an arch of triumph intended to uphold, not a quadriga, but human patriotism, self-abnegation and virtue" (Rodin). He portrayed the heroes appealing for clemency according to medieval tradition, in other words, wearing a shirt, a rope around the neck, with bare head and feet. At the same time, he gave their faces the typical features of the Calais region in order to give this drama a real and contemporary dimension. This aspect was further enhanced by the sculptor's decision to place his monument on a very low pedestal. Although the first maquette had shown the figures standing on a high pedestal in a heroic attitude, the second one (July 1885) presented them almost at the same level as the ground.

Karl-Henri (Charles) Bodmer
Nude Figure of Pierre de Wissant in the studio
circa 1886
gelatin silver print
25,3 x 21,5 cm
Ph. 322

As they were initially modelled one third of their final size, "it should be no cause for surprise that some details have been neglected, because in general all the draperies will be worked again in the final size" (Rodin). The figures were first treated one by one and in the nude (see the maquettes in room 12 and the photographic reproductions of the big models in the studio, as well as the eight large models in the garden). Rodin only clothed them during the second stage, in order to faithfully respect the anatomy and bring out "beneath these draperies, bone structures, nervous systems, all the organs of the body, human beings in flesh and blood" (Gustave Geffroy, Monet-Rodin exhibition, 1889). He then assembled them together, ensuring the close cohesion of the group by uniting the personages around the set of keys.

Jacques-Ernest Bulloz
The Monument to the Burghers of Calais on a scaffolding
gelatin silver print
26,7 x 37 cm
Ph. 7003

The group was completed in 1889 and the plaster exhibited that same year at the Galerie Georges Petit in Paris as part of the Monet-Rodin exhibition. But it was not inaugurated in Calais until August 1895, on a traditionally high pedestal, to the great regret of Rodin who would have preferred the group to be displayed "very low to enable the spectators to penetrate the heart of the subject, like entombments in churches, where the group is almost at ground level. (...) In this way, the group becomes more familiar and plunges the viewers deeper into the tragedy and sacrifice of the drama" (Rodin to Dewavrin, 8 December 1893).
This is how the monument, cast in bronze in 1926 for the Museum collections, is presented in the garden, almost level with the ground.

The Monument
to Balzac
The Monument to Balzac
1898
bronze
270 x 120 x 128 cm
S.1296
Photo : J. Manoukian


Given that this major project was executed at the height of Rodin's career, it was no longer a question of describing or relating an anecdote but, rather, of allowing the viewer to penetrate into the depths of the character concerned. "I understood", Rodin told Gsell, "(that it was necessary) to provide a glimpse of the environment in which the portrayed personage lived, and to create in the imagination a halo of ideas describing this personality. In this way, art is extended by mysterious waves" (Paul Gsell, Le musée Rodin à Meudon, La Renaissance de l'Art français et des Industries de luxe, August 1923).
"You will have observed", Gsell commented in his turn, "that in the era we are entering, nothing has more importance to us than our own feelings, our own intimate person (...). And you have revealed to us this predisposition which we were almost unaware of" (Rodin, L'Art, Entretiens avec Paul Gsell, 1911). Rodin, in fact, concentrated on the "intimate person", seeking to disclose his depth and richness rather than to remind us of the external circumstances of a life. For The Monument to Balzac, commissioned from him in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres, under the impetus of its president, Emile Zola, he started wisely by studying contemporary portraits of the novelist. He pondered over the stature of Balzac, his facial features, his clothes (the famous dressing gown), but only retained the details which served his purpose (the corpulence of Balzac, the monk's robe he wore when he worked). The result was a figure which was both an allegory of the creative powers of the novelist and a moral rather than physical portrait of the writer. "It was creation itself which used the shape of Balzac to emerge: the arrogance of creation, its pride, feverishness and intoxication" (R.M. Rilke, Auguste Rodin, 1928).
Anonymous
Three studies of heads of Balzac
albumen print
9,5 x 15,1cm
Ph. 1213

The bold image which emerged, "less a statue than a sort of strange monolith, a thousand-year-old menhir, one of those rocks on which the quirks of prehistoric volcanic eruptions froze a human face by chance" (Georges Rodenbach, L'Elite, 1899), ignited a controversy during the 1898 Salon. "Never has anyone had the idea of extracting the brain of a man and applying it on his face", wrote Rochefort in L'Intransigeant (1st May 1898). The heated debate between those for and against the Balzac was all the more violent in that it broke out in the midst of the Dreyfus affair for which Zola, who supported Rodin, led the Dreyfus side with his famous "J'accuse"(L'Aurore, 13 January 1898). The alarmed Société des Gens de Lettres therefore refused the statue and ordered another one from Alexandre Falguière who executed a figure lacking in grandeur. It was so banal that it aroused the irony of the public. All Falguière needed to do, having "borrowed (from Rodin) the powerful neck, sturdy build, drapery, hair, chin, pupils of his Balzac (...), was to seat his personage, thus diminished, on a park bench" (Charles Chincholle, in La Petite République, 15 November 1898).

Edward Steichen
The open sky, 11p.m.
1908
25,2 x 22 cm
Ph. 235

As for Rodin's large plaster, it was transported to Meudon where Steichen took the most sublime night photographs. Rodin was worried about the rumours provoked by his work and therefore refused to allow a subscription to be opened to have it cast in bronze. Forty years were to pass before his Balzac was placed at the Raspail-Montparnasse junction on 2 July 1939. In the meantime, the Rodin Museum had made a second example which the curator, Georges Grappe, intended to place in Meudon, in front of the Museum on the spur overlooking the valley. However, the war prevented this project from being carried out and the bronze was installed in Paris instead, while the admirable series of studies for the monument are displayed in Meudon.
After this failure, Rodin did not complete any monuments with the exception of the one to Sarmiento (Buenos Aires, 1894-1900), not for lack of commissions (for example, the Monuments to Puvis de Chavannes and Whistler, ordered in 1899 and in 1905, and left unfinished) or for lack of inspiration, but because "I tend to reflect more", he confided to Dujardin-Beaumetz at the end of his life, "my determination is stronger. This is why I work more slowly. Besides, it is not in my nature to rush"(Entretiens avec Rodin, 1913).

The Sculptor - Early Works - The Gates of Hell and Related Works -
The Walking Man - The Monuments - The Marble Sculptures