A Gift from Auguste Rodin to Eugène Carrière: Hands as a Token of Friendship
If the hand is Rodin’s preferred motif, three plaster studies tell the story of the admiration and friendship between the sculptor and the painter Eugène Carrière.
Estimate: €30,000/40,000
When Eugène Carrière died in 1906, Auguste Rodin asked for permission to take impressions of his face and hands. The painter and sculptor had met almost thirty years earlier, in the early 1880s, through art critic Roger Marx. The gesture, to be put in the context of mourning practices at the time, is not exceptional, and other intellectuals and artists are remembered through such casts. But here it reveals the real friendship between the two men. Eugène Carrière took the floor on several occasions to defend or praise Rodin’s work. He took part in his support committee in 1898, in the midst of the controversy surrounding his statue of Balzac, and introduced his 1900 exhibition with these words–“Rodin’s art emerges from the earth and returns to it, similar to the giant blocks that affirm solitudes and in whose heroic growth man has recognized himself”–which set him far above other artists. On several occasions, he portrays himself, and whether at work or posing, the intensity of his gaze shines through, despite the absence of color associated with charcoal or sanguine techniques. Rodin did not reciprocate, but on his death founded the Société des amis d’Eugène Carrière and sketched out a project for a monument to his memory. The two friends exchanged works throughout their lives; the sale of Eugène Carrière’s studio on February 2-3, 1920, included several plaster casts and bronzes by Rodin, while the sculptor had several paintings by Carrière in his museum. The three hand studies in plaster offered for sale (€30,000/40,000), which remained in the painter’s family until 1935 before passing into the Séré de Rivières Collection, all bear Rodin’s signature in an incised line. He was known to offer such gifts to his friends and supporters. The sharp, protruding drips and knife marks are indicative of the mold process, as well as demolding. Rodin frequently used duplication techniques, copying terracotta elements he had modeled himself, and this was an integral part of his working method, on an equal footing with assemblage. There are hundreds of hands in his work, and many more in his museum, if you count the fragments from classical antiquity he collected. Trained at the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques, known as the “Petite École”, the sculptor studied the human body in pieces and by copying often fragmentary antique sculptures, and soon gave as much value to the part as to the whole. The French sculptor even considered the fragment with a modern perspective, no longer as an accidental vestige, but as a deliberate act. Rodin created parts in isolation, building up a repertoire of forms. Using the term abbatis, he models arms, heads, legs, hands and feet of all sizes in clay, which he then casts in plaster. This process, which allows for reuse and greater speed of execution, also offering Rodin great freedom in assembly. For example, in L’Adieu, produced around 1893-1895, he “glued” a sculpture such as the Female Right Hand, similar to the one in this sale, to the head of another, such as the short-haired Camille Claudel.
Rodin’s hands reflect a meticulous observation that borders on the case study.
Surgical Precision
Rodin paid great attention to the extremities, particularly the hands. He told his friend Armand Dayot: “I had to work very hard to achieve maximum truth of expression in the modeling of the hand. The study of the human hand is full of difficulties. Today I find it a most familiar subject, and I enjoy it effortlessly.” In fact, it became an increasingly autonomous part of his work, until, around 1900, it became a veritable obsession. As hand surgeon Raoul Tubiana notes in an article devoted to the artist in Journal of Hand Therapy (1992), Rodin’s hands reflect a meticulous observation that borders on the case study. A closer look at our Female Right Hand, Fingers Semi-Folded, Ring Finger Raised, or our highly expressionistic Right Hand, Middle Finger Raised and Wrist Broken, reveals a real play of combinations. In the first case, there are eight other plaster casts in the Rodin Museum, three of which have no thumbs and are cast separately. In the second, it is similar to the Grande main gauche dite main de pianiste (plaster, Paris, Musée Rodin, inv. S.03186) or the Main gauche (terracotta, Paris, Musée Rodin, inv. S.01355); this system of inversion between left and right can thus be interpreted as a reflection on the notion of reproduction and the creative gesture itself. Associated with God, or with the idea of the sacred through the assemblage La Cathédrale, the hand is for Rodin a separate entity, which needs no attribute to be expressive and to testify to vitality, as his contemporaries well understood. In 1900, commenting on Eugène Druet’s photos, Gustave Kahn wrote in the Symbolist magazine La Plume that Rodin was the sculptor of hands, with all their ambiguities, gentleness and fury. The part embodies the whole. If “the hand reveals the man”, as Hélène Marraud’s book on Rodin’s specific work suggests, above all it reveals the sculptor. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in the text dedicated to Rodin, does not fail to underline this: “The artist is the one whose task it is, from many things, to make a single thing and, from the smallest part of a single thing, to make a world. In Rodin’s work, there are hands, small autonomous hands that, without being part of any body, are alive.”
Tableaux, mobilier et objets d’art, verreries, sculptures, bronzes
Friday 29 November 2024 – 14:30 (CET) – Live
3, boulevard Michelet – 31000 Toulouse
Marc Labarbe
