Auguste Rodin. Les Cathédrales de France. Part One

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Auguste Rodin
Les Cathédrales de France [Cathedrals of France]
Introduction by Charles Morice

Paris, 1914, Libraire Armand Colin, 164 pages

Review by Francesco Mazzaferro. Part One

Fig. 1) The first version of Les Cathédrales de France dated 1914,
in the online catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France

At times, to read works of art literature may give us real surprises: there are artists who have written very different texts from what we would expect on the basis of the current overall appreciation of their works. The great Parisian retrospective dedicated to Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), on the occasion of the centenary of his death, offered us an imagine of him as an artist projected to the future, i.e. as the founder of modern and even contemporary statuary. Rodin would be the first artist to treat the human figure in a modern way. He would inaugurate a plastic art capable of capturing all the anxieties and anomalies of a new era. Rodin’s anniversary provided us this year the image of a global artist, able to create aesthetic bonds with artists throughout Europe and to serve everywhere as a model. It was a fascinating exhibition (and with a really valuable catalogue), as it offered us parallels with sculptors of the time, French or not (like Aristide Maillol and Georg Kolbe), but above all with Giacometti, Brancusi and the whole sculpture in the mid-twentieth century. Without Rodin - this is the implied message of the Parisian centenary - we would even not be able to grasp contemporaries like Lüpertz and Baselitz.

A second exhibition, held currently in Paris at the Rodin Museum, is devoted entirely to Anselm Kiefer's reinterpretation of Rodin's writing on Les Cathédrales de France; for this event, Kiefer has produced a new series of works on the subject. It is there that I discovered, a few weeks ago, the existence of the only book signed by the sculptor, a volume which does not belong to the most famous works of art literature, at least in my country (there is no Italian translation until now, even though the publication of the first version in our language may be imminent). However, reading the book, released in 1914, I discovered Rodin was in reality an artist all turned towards the past, radically anti-modern and chauvinistic. How is such a radical difference possible between the backward-looking tone of the text he wrote in the early twentieth century and this year’s forward-looking reading of August Rodin's sculptural (and literary) work in occasion of the celebrations devoted to him?

Fig. 2) Exhibition poster for Rodin's centenary in Paris

Fig. 3) Anselm Kiefer, Les cathédrales de France, 2017. In the showcases, "marble-looking books" (livres aux effets marbrés) with Kiefer's images, representing the eroticization of cathedrals by Rodin

The many question marks around the first version

Let us start with some considerations on the text. The original version of Les Cathédrales de France of 1914 [1] was published in a composition that would no longer appear in any subsequent version, until a reprint in 1983. It consisted of three parts: an almost one-hundred page long introductory essay on Gothic art by Charles Morice (1860-1919), the true text by Rodin and one hundred out of text drawings with architectural themes, which had never been printed before. A few pages of the publisher, the Librairie Armand Colin, preceded all of this: the main concern was to explain that, despite the title, the whole was not a scientific text on cathedrals in France: "This book is not a scientific work, not an archaeological or architectural treatise. The author's point of view, his methods of observation, his means of expression, are quite different from those of scholars. Where the artist and the scholars come to the same conclusions, they have arrived by different paths. But it will be recognized that such an accord confers upon these conclusions an incomparable value and significance" [2]. Rodin's writing, in sum, was presented as a testimony of purely personal nature: it was a reflection of the emotions experienced by the sculptor while visiting the Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals of his country (over a long period of years).

Fig. 4) Table I, Avallon,
Source: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65835520/f137.image

Fig. 5) Table LXXII, Study
Source: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65835520/f137.image

Some question marks, however, come immediately to our mind. The first concerns the 100 drawings. With the exception of the first tables, they were not sketches of Gothic or Romanesque cathedrals, but studies of architectural orders and outlines from Renaissance-style constructions. Perhaps this can be explained by Rodin’s conviction that the Renaissance architecture in France was derived directly from the Gothic (and not from the Italian one). Rodin spoke in fact of ‘gotique-renaissance’ (Gothic and Renaissance), coining a combined expression which to my knowledge has never been used anywhere else. However, it cannot be ruled out that the decision by the publisher to set together the 100 drawings despite their architectonic heterogeneity was not an aesthetic choice. Colin may have simply used all of the existing material up to now unpublished, including them in the volume independently on whether they referred to cathedrals or not.

Fig. 6) Eugene Carriere, Portrait of Charles Morice, without date

The second question concerns Charles Morice. Literate and poet, he had already published a monograph on Rodin in 1900. Not only that: he was known in the environment for editing Paul Gauguin's manuscript of Noah-noa for publication in 1901. The man was persistently indebted due to his alcohol and women addiction [3]. It seems that Morice offered himself to help Rodin shape the work (at an unprecise moment in the first decade of the century, which Haskell fixed in 1908 and Duouis-Labbé in 1911). The relationship must have been strained, if Rodin replaced him almost at the end of the work - as Dominique Dupuis-Labbé wrote - with Louis Gillet (1876-1943), "art historian and collaborator of the Revue de deux mondes" [4]. One aspect, however, seems clear: Rodin must have drafted handwritten notes, compiled in between 1877 and 1906 (see Part Two), which for their unequal nature, repetitions and inconsistencies were absolutely not ready for publication. This made it absolutely necessary to hire an editor.

The role of Morice, in short, seems to have not been confined to authoring the broad introduction, but included the correction and partial rewriting (it is not clear to what extent) of Rodin's texts. This is confirmed by Marcelle Tirel, the last secretary (and one of the many lovers) of the artist, in a memoir of 1923, significantly titled in French "Intimate Rodin or Reverse of Glory" and published in English with the sombre title “The Last Years of Rodin” [5]: "I was typewriting (continuously and without Rodin never being pleased) the manuscript of the Cathedrals, which Charles Morice was then adjusting. For months and months, it was an infinite and tedious doing and unravelling. I verbatim reproduced his notes on architecture. But it was he who wanted to have the lead and often, when I re-read a passage which in my view barely held together, he exclaimed, 'oh how beautiful! ... how beautiful!' Rodin, on the other hand, had doubts about his value as writer and often confessed: 'I'm not complete.' But writing, for him, was an obsession and at the same time he enjoyed it. One day, coming to my office, he recognized: 'Making a book is difficult' and added immediately: 'It's like sculpting'." [6] Rodin even felt he had lost control of his manuscript, as it becomes clear from the words which Ms Tirel reported. He was complaining about the magnitude of Morice's revisions: "Charles Morice read me a chapter of the Cathedrals and I did not understand anything. He makes me lie about everything. On the other hand, he is a critic. Critics do not understand art, both in painting and in sculpture" [7]. A little later, Ms Tirel recalled the day of the conclusion of the proofreading at the Colin publishing house. Rodin seemed disappointed and exhausted, and revealed to the secretary: "We have worked hard, but very little has remained of mine... It is the same as what happens with Charles Morice. These gentlemen change everything. I just wanted them to correct my spelling mistakes and they altered my ideas. They were even unable to find a title I would like "[8].

Let's go back for a moment to the publisher's initial warning. The text explained - as we have said - that Cathedrals of France were nothing else but a series of records, notes and personal considerations. Yet the publishers denied (as logical) any third party interventions. "Thus it is uniquely the worth of an artist that we present to the public – of an artist whose sense of beauty none will contest. Day by day, as chance ordained through his periodic visits to the cathedrals, Rodin noted his observations and justified his admirations. These are his Notes that we are publishing, just as they are, with the apparent disorder in which they nonetheless harmonize and compose with one another. We have scrupulously respected their form which, overlooking transitions, preserves the whole spontaneity and persuasive power of the sentiments and ideas ” [9]. From what has been said earlier, I believe that these words were perhaps hiding a difficult relationship between the publisher and the author, and between the latter and Morice.

The historical moment

Fig. 7) The Reims cathedral damaged by German bombings in 1916. Source: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5e/France%2C_Reims_and_its_cathedral%2C_1916.jpg

Cathedrals of France was published in the late fall of 1914, a few months after the cathedral of Reims had been severely damaged by the shelling of the German army in September of the same year. It happened just a month after the Great war started in August 1914. By coincidence (the text was in preparation for years) the writing was therefore made public at a time when the whole of France recognized itself behind the symbolic value of cathedrals. Reims' bombing caused a huge upsurge of consciences in France against what was felt to be the false claim of the German world to represent European culture. How could these 'barbarians' arrogate the right to defend what they called 'Kultur'? In their turn, in Germany, 93 exponents of the cultural community answered in October 1914 with an anti-French manifesto (entitled Aufruf an die Kulturwelt!), which justified the use of force in war even against historical monuments, obviously in the name of the supposed superiority of German culture. Europe was, therefore, in the midst of the perverse plot between scholars and military.

Fig. 8) Rainer Maria Rilke (left) and Auguste Rodin (right) in Paris in 1902

A German translation still in the war time

Yet, the fortune of Rodin's book crossed the boundaries between the belligerent countries. As a testimony to the great fame of the artist in Germany (in 1903 Rainer Maria Rilke had published an undeniably fortunate essay dedicated to him), a German translation of the first edition of Cathedrals of France (with 32 tables) was released in Leipzig in 1917, still during war time, by Max Brod (1884-1968) [10]. It was a really courageous move, if one thinks that one of the recurring themes in the book was to claim the "supremacy of the French race" (and those passages were not censored).

Fig. 9) Willi Nowak, Portrait of Max Brod, without date

To take such a bold step against the militarist spirit permeating the German culture of those years, the energy of great men was needed. Max Brod was a cosmopolitan citizen of Czech nationality (but German-speaking). He was, among other things, a fraternal friend and the patron of Franz Kafka and of many other writers and musicians in the Habsburg world (Franz Werfel, Leoš Janáček). Leipzig's publisher, Kurt Wolff, was one of the mythical figures of German culture: between 1910 and 1930 his editing company published practically all the great texts of modern literature and expressionist art in Germany, until it was closed by the Nazis for both ideological and racial reasons (Kurt then fled to the United States, where he created the still active Pantheon Books publishing house). The German text of Die Kathedralen Frankreichs of 1917 was limited to Rodin's only writing: the publishers completely ignored Morice's long introductory text, nor replaced it with another version. It would also have been difficult to explain - to readers of a country still in war with France - the reasons why a contemporary text of one of the greatest French artists was being published. Immediately after the war, during the Weimar Republic, the book of the French sculptor was considered above all as a piece of experimental literature: the pages describing the night impressions in the cathedral of Reims (memoirs that obviously referred to a pre-war period, and therefore to the still intact cathedral) impressed among other things Gerhard Hauptmann, the 1912 Nobel Prize in Literature. He wrote that they were a perfect case of literary representation of a dream [11].

Fig. 10) The frontispiece of the first German translation in 1917

A second French edition

The French text of the cathedrals changed in 1921, when the second edition [12] was published by Léonce Bénédite (1859-1925), art historian and director of the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, and perhaps the greatest friend of the sculptor during life and his executor after death. The publisher was always Colin in Paris. And yet, both the initial caveat with the warning on the nature of the writing, with which the publisher intended perhaps to protect himself from excessive expectations in 1914, as well as the long essay by Morice, disappeared. They were replaced by a brief but dense introduction by Bénédite: "In 1877, when he left Brussels to settle permanently in Paris, Rodin made a journey across the northern regions of France. He wanted to visit the cathedrals there” [13]. Bénédite explained that - two years after his trip to Italy where he had dealt with Michelangelo and Donatello - Rodin wanted to "understand the means used by our ancient French illustrators to associate so closely and potentially decoratively the figures of their porticoes, their friezes and their steeples to the great architectural mass of their buildings” [14]. If, in 1914, the text was considered to be a poetic work, in 1921 it was instead seen by Bénédite as a fundamental step to allow the public to fully understand, for example, the Gates of Hell and the Burghers of Calais, some among the most famous works of the artist, at which the sculptor worked practically during all of his life. The text on the cathedrals was a testimony - Bénédite wrote - of the love of the sculptor for architecture, which Rodin regarded as the most "cerebral and sensitive of the arts” [15]. In short, the new perspective offered to the reader was that of an important text to understand the aesthetic beliefs of the artist. The 100 tables with Rodin’s drawings were also deleted, so that the focus was all on his text. The Colin publisher issued this version again in 1921, 1925, 1931, 1941 and 1946.

Fig. 11) Auguste Rodin, Gates of Hell, 1880-1917, in the plaster version of 1917 at the Orsay Museum, Paris

Fig. 12) Auguste Rodin, Burghers of Calais, in the plaster version of 1889, Rodin Museum, Paris

Again in Germany, in Hitler's time

The continued interest in the German world for Rodin's text was proven by a new translation [16] by Arthur Seiffhart (1880-1959), a linguist who produced, among other things, a Franco-German dictionary and many German translations of French (and English) literature. The publisher Genius in Berlin published it in 1935 in full Nazism, and it was probably conceived to replace the previous version by Wolff, which was seized and removed from commerce by the Gestapo in 1933. Clearly, in the Nazi world Rodin's text was not considered in any way an anti-Germanic manifesto (so that Seiffhart's translation was even republished in 1941), as its aesthetic conservatism turned out to be in line with that of the Nazi regime. It is no coincidence that Rodin was highly appreciated by the national socialist artists (Arno Breker, the main regime sculptor, considered him as his master) and the centenary of his birth in 1940 was celebrated in Paris with an exhibition devoted to him and Monet, during the military occupation by the Wehrmacht. It is a confirmation that the sculptor's text can be read in different ways.

Translations in Spanish (1935 and 1943) and in English (1965)

In the Spanish-speaking world, the publisher El Ateneo issued a first translation [17] of Las Catedrales de Francia in Buenos Aires in 1935 by Roberto Ledesma (1901-1963). This poet also produced the translation into Spanish of Rainer Maria Rilke's essay on Rodin. In 1943 the same publisher entrusted a second translation to the art historian Angel Osvaldo Nessi (1914-2000) [18]. Both editions were commented by José R. Destéfano.

Fig. 13) The two Spanish versions of 1935 and 1943, with translations by Roberto Ledesma and Angel Osvaldo Nessi

The first translation into English [19] was instead drafted by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler (1901-2001) in 1965, and completed by a preface by Herbert Read (1893-1968), a famous historian of sculptor and great expert of Rodin. Also Ms Geissbuhler authored numerous monographs dedicated to the French artist, and gained fame as a specialist on him in the United States.

In line with Léonce Bénédite, Read interpreted the text as an essay on sculpture. “Paradoxically, this is a book about sculpture. It is also a book about the great sculptor who wrote it, Rodin. He realized, as no sculptor since the Middle Ages had done, that the formal characteristics of sculpture and architecture are identical. Sculpture had no separate origin; architecture had no separate origin. From prehistoric times the two arts were as integral as the womb and the fetus. The life within and the shell without were molded by the same destiny, the same desire. Rodin was the first modern sculptor to understand this vital connection between the two arts and the greatness of his work is a direct consequence of this understanding” [20].  

Fig. 14) Auguste Rodin, Iris, Messenger of the Gods, about 1895

The English translation of 1965 was reviewed by Francis Haskell, the father of social art history, on the New York Review of Books [21]. Unlike Read, Haskell did not hide a fundamentally sceptical tone about an artist, whom he considered to express unresolved ambiguities and hence to be substantially overrated: in fact, the artist aimed at achieving a result (the celebration of the human body) that, in Haskell's view, was already surpassed by the progress achieved by the art of his time (Impressionism and Post-Impressionism). Rodin, therefore, pursued impossible and contradictory tasks. The mystical exaltation of the cathedrals glorified by the artist’s text was, in the opinion of the British critic, due to mental excitement. This corresponded to a stage in his life in which he was honoured as no other sculptor since Michelangelo, but also experienced a deep personal crisis. When the writing was published in 1914, Rodin was a sick man, surrounded by exploiters who wanted to catch his goods and still prisoner of the morbid erotic obsessions that had persecuted him all his life. The cathedrals (and the eroticisation of their architecture, which he proposed) would thus - according to Haskell - reveal all the contradictions of the artist's personality and work: "Never did an apotheosis take place amid so much squalor and pathos" [22].

Fig. 15) Auguste Rodin, The Cathedral, 1908

However - Haskell continued - this time in line with Read's interpretation - the reading of  Cathedrals offers useful elements to better understand his aesthetic categories, not only in terms of architecture, but above all of sculpture. "The very first words of the book which seek to explain that ‘Cathedrals impose a sense of confidence ... by their harmony ... the counterbalancing of masses they move …’ echo a definition of his own sculptural principles which he had given to a visitor some years earlier, and when, a page or two later, we come across the phase ‘Let us not forget that power brings firth grace; there is perversion of taste or perversity of mind in looking for grace in weakness,’ it is natural to recall that Rilke had in 1903 characterized one of the essentials of Rodin’s art as ‘the grace of great things.’ The whole book, in fact, is full of such echoes, and despite the eloquence of many, and the real beauty of a few, passages, an ability to enjoy it depends largely on how far we are prepared to accept Rodin’s overwhelming personality and prejudices expressed here through the medium of an art which did not come natural to him. For much that we find disturbing even in his sculpture is paraded here with greater blatancy: the rhetoric which often takes the form of a bombastic chauvinism; the distinctly mawkish sexuality of some of his later works (...); the violent dislike of the modern world” [23].

Fig. 16) Auguste Rodin, Prayer, 1909

New versions of Cathedrals to date

After the uninterrupted success of the second edition of the book between 1921 and 1946, several decades of silence followed in the French world. Probably, in the after war decades, many aspects of the text (perhaps, above all, its cultural traditionalism) did not fit well with the wish to renew French culture. Silence broke down in 1983, thanks to two parallel initiatives. On the one hand, a valuable facsimile version for bibliophiles of the 1914 first edition edited by Charles Morice was published (including his one-hundred page introduction on gothic art and Rodin's hundred tables); on the other hand a pocket version of the same first edition (but with a reduced number of tables) was released by Denoël Publishers in Paris. 

Fig. 17) The cover of the edition for bibliophiles of 1983

Lastly, in 2010, the latest pocket edition (the one that I have read in the re-edition of 2012) was printed with a new introduction by Dominique Dupuis-Labbé. The scholar explained the publication of Rodin's texts on cathedrals as part of a wider aesthetic movement in France that, in the last quarter of 1800 and the early decades of 1900, rediscovered them as the most precious symbol of the country's cultural heritage. She quoted, among others, the works of Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine and Paul Claudel among French writers, the translation of Ruskin's Amiens Bible by Marcel Proust, Claude Debussy and his piano prelude Cathédrale engloutie among musicians, and of course, the series of Claude Monet’s paintings on the cathedral in Rouen [24].

Fig. 18) Claude Monet, Facade of the Rouen Cathedral, Facade 1, 1892-1894

It is obvious that the theme of the cathedral dominated Rodin's contemporaries' interest. In fact - Dominique Dupuis-Labbé said - Rodin rather considered himself the heir to a centenary tradition of valorisation of the Gothic tradition, which saw his first exponent in Jean-François-Félibien in 1699. In the history of taste in France, the Gothic was subject to recurrent waves of love and hatred: the cathedrals were disrupted during the Revolution of 1789 and rediscovered in the first half of the nineteenth century with the return of the Ancien Régime. Although Rodin spoke of "death of the cathedrals", there was never a complete historical oblivion of them: for instance, after the defeat by the Prussians in 1871, the cathedrals had indeed become the symbol of France's national identity, despite the highly repressive policies against the Church of the Third Republic. So, in this new interpretation provided by Dupuis-Labbé, Rodin's pages became a testimony to how French society had found its identity symbols in the history of its monuments.

There are currently available versions in English [25] (1981), German [26] (1988), Russian [27] (2002), Chinese [28] (2008) and Spanish [29]. The Italian Castelvecchi publisher has recently announced in the internet the forthcoming release of the first version in Italian, perhaps still in 2017.

End of Part One
Go to Part Two 

NOTES

[1] Rodin, Auguste - Les cathédrales de France. Introduction by Charles Morice, Librairie Armand Colin, Paris, 1914, pages CXI, 164 plus 100 tables out of text.
See: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k65835520

[2] Rodin, Auguste – Cathedrals of France. Country Life, Translation by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler, Preface by Herbert Read, Beacon Press, Boston, USA, 1965, 278 pages. Quotation at page xv.

[3] Haskell, Francis – The Cathedrals of Rodin, in The New York Review of Books, December 9, 1965.
See: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1965/12/09/the-cathedrals-of-rodin/ .

[4] Rodin, Auguste - Les cathédrales de France. Introduction by Dominique Dupuis-Labbé, Bartillat, Paris, 2012, 249 pages. Quotation at page 8.

[5] Tirel, Marcelle - Rodin intime: ou l'Envers d'une gloire. Aux éditions du Monde nouveau, Paris, 1923, 224 pages.
See:  http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6572673x.
English translation: Marcelle Tirel - The Last Years of Rodin, Translation by R. Francis, Haskell House, 1925, 224 pages.

[6] Tirel, Marcelle - Rodin intime: ou l'Envers d'une gloire (quoted), pp. 87-88.

[7] Tirel, Marcelle - Rodin intime: ou l'Envers d'une gloire (quoted), pp. 87-88.

[8] Tirel, Marcelle - Rodin intime: ou l'Envers d'une gloire (quoted), p. 90.

[9] Rodin, Auguste -  Les cathédrales de France (…) 1914, quoted, p. 6.

[10] Rodin, Auguste -  Die Kathedralen Frankreichs: mit Handzeichnungen Rodins auf 32 Tafeln. Translation by Max Brodt, Kurt Wolff Verlag, Leipzig, 1917, 207 pages plus 32 tables out of text.

[11] Sprengel, Peter - Die Wirklichkeit der Mythen: Untersuchungen zum Werk Gerhart Hauptmanns, S + W Steuer- und Wirtschaftsverlag, Freiburg, 1982, 418 pages. Quotation at page 159.

[12] Rodin, Auguste - Les cathédrales de France. Introduction by Léonce Bénédite, Librairie Armand Colin, Paris, 248 pages.
See: https://archive.org/stream/lescathdralesd00rodi#page/n3/mode/2up).

[13] Rodin, Auguste - Les cathédrales de France (…) 1921, quoted, p. V.

[14] Rodin, Auguste - Les cathédrales de France (…) 1921, quoted, p. V.

[15] Rodin, Auguste - Les cathédrales de France (…) 1921, quoted, p. VII.

[16] Rodin, Auguste - Die Kathedralen Frankreichs. Translation by Arthur Seiffhart. Geniusverlag, Berlin, 1935, 206 pages.

[17] Rodin, Auguste - Las Catedrales de Francia, Introduction by José R. Destéfano. Spanish version by Roberto Ledesma, Librería y Editorial El Ateneo, Buenos Aires, 240 pages.

[18] Rodin, Auguste -  Las Catedrales de Francia, Introduction by José R. Destéfano, Spanish version by Ángel Osvaldo Nessi, Buenos Aires, Librería y Editorial El Ateneo, 1943, 242 pages.

[19] Rodin, Auguste – Cathedrals of France. (…) 1965, quoted.

[20] Rodin, Auguste – Cathedrals of France, (quoted), p. v.

[21] Haskell, Francis – The Cathedrals of Rodin, quoted.

[22] Haskell, Francis – The Cathedrals of Rodin, quoted.

[23] Haskell, Francis – The Cathedrals of Rodin, quoted.

[24] Rodin, Auguste - Les cathédrales de France, 2012, quoted, p. 10

[25] Rodin, Auguste - Cathedrals of France. Translation by Elisabeth Chase Geissbuhler, Black Swan Books, Redding Ridge, 1981, 278 pages

[26] Rodin, Auguste - Die Kathedralen Frankreichs, Translation by Max Brod, Postscript by Beat Wyss, Verlag für Architektur Artemis, Zurich and Munich, 1988, 215 pages.

[27] Роден, О - Завещание. Беседы об искусстве. Французские соборы. Письма, Азбука, 2002, 624 pages

[28] 法国大教堂, Fa guo da jiao tang, Edited by Luo dan. Translation byYe xiao hong. Tianjin education Press, 293 pages.

[29] Rodin, Auguste -  Las Catedrales de Francia, Translation by Yago Barja de Quiroga Losada, Abada, Madrid, 2014, 344 pages.