Matisse & Rodin
Musée Rodin, Paris, until 28 February 2010
Of the grand 18th-century mansions with spectacular gardens that once lined the rue de Varenne in Paris, only two have escaped the developers. The Hôtel Matignon at number 57 survives intact as the residence of the French Prime Minister, but the Hôtel Biron at number 79 owes its escape to an artists’ colony. In the 19th century, the Maréchal de Biron’s former home became a convent school for young ladies; when the nuns moved out in 1905, the artists moved in. Isadora Duncan opened a dance school in the upstairs gallery, Matisse took over the classrooms across the garden, and in 1908, following a tip-off from another tenant, Rilke, the 67-year-old Rodin moved his studio to a suite of reception rooms on the ground floor.
‘In this monastic retreat,’ reported the sculptor’s amanuensis Paul Gsell in 1911, ‘he enjoys shutting himself up with the nudity of pretty young women, making countless pencil drawings of the supple poses they adopt in front of him.’ In 1912, Le Figaro expressed outrage that ‘contrary to all propriety’ the old satyr was ‘exhibiting a series of libidinous drawings and shameless sketches in the former chapel of the Sacred Heart’. But it was the old satyr who saved the Hôtel Biron for posterity, transforming it into the Musée Rodin, and his shameless sketches are now back on the chapel walls in an exhibition reuniting the building’s two most famous artist tenants.
Organised in conjunction with the Musée Matisse in Nice, Matisse & Rodin is actually more of a confrontation than a reunion, as the two artists were not friends. Matisse never completely forgave the older artist for an early rebuff when in 1899, aged 31, he took some simple line drawings to show his hero and was told to come back when he’d done some more ‘pernickety’ ones. Understandably, he never did. But later that year he spent precious money on a plaster bust of Rochefort by Rodin. It stands facing the exhibition entrance at the end of a long corridor of drawings, Matisse’s labelled with blue tags, Rodin’s with yellow.
The colour coding highlights the risk of confusing two artists who, across the age divide, had a lot in common. The 80 sculptures Matisse produced — nearly all in the show — were mostly nudes, like the vast majority of Rodin’s 6,500. Both sculptors modelled in clay from life, and both drew on antiquity. In later life Rodin relied increasingly for inspiration on his ‘eleventh-hour friends’, as he called his enormous collection of antique fragments. Their influence on him is direct and obvious: the green patinated ‘Torso of a Young Woman with Arched Back’ (1909) might have been fished out of the sea. In Matisse’s case, the inheritance was through Rodin: his first major bronze, ‘The Slave’ (1900–03), with its lopped-off arms, is a direct descendant of Rodin’s ‘Walking Man’ (1877).
The deliberate placing of Rodin’s etching ‘La Ronde’ (1883), with its Dionysiac ring of dancing figures, alongside a 1909 study for Matisse’s ‘La Danse’ suggests that even this most iconic of Matisse images owed something to Rodin. This section of the show on Dance, Poise and Flight alone is worth the Eurostar ticket. Under the guardianship of Rodin’s ‘Iris’ (1895), provocatively positioned with her crotch at eye level, six of the sculptor’s studies of ‘Dance Movements’ (1911) erupt in a series of high kicks, splits and frolics with the pent-up energy of kids let out of class: a feral figure of Nijinsky (1912) acts as a backstop. A 1930 pencil sketch by Matisse of a high-kicking dancer with her left knee up around her ear has the same physical energy, but less wildness: she’s performing for an audience, not letting rip.
Matisse’s nudes tend to be self-conscious, even brazen. If it’s possible to flounce with no clothes on, then his standing bronze ‘Madeleine II’ (1903) is doing it, whereas the very same posture in Rodin’s ‘The Inner Voice’ (1894) is suggestive of anguished introspection. Whether standing, sitting, crouching or reclining, Matisse’s nudes are all basically odalisques, eager to please, whereas Rodin’s guard their privacy and feminine mystique no matter how much of themselves they expose (an astonishing feat, given his working practice of aggressively invading their personal space).
Rodin said that he worked 14-hour days because ‘rest is monotonous and has the sadness of everything that comes to an end’, but the sadness penetrated anyway. In the exhibition’s final showdown, Matisse’s four monumental ‘Backs’ (1910–30) are lined up back-to-back with Rodin’s ‘Torso of a Seated Woman’ (1910–14). Matisse’s row of increasingly abstracted reliefs, morphing from caryatid to menhir, presents the eternal feminine as indestructible; Rodin’s lone torso exposes it as heartbreakingly vulnerable. Matisse’s backs look built to outlast Carnac, whereas Rodin’s embodies the sadness of everything that comes to an end.
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