Mouvement de danse (étude type H) petit modèle

Signed A. Rodin and no.12
Inscribed Georges Rudier Fondeur Paris and © by Musée Rodin 1965

Bronze with dark green and brown patina

Height: 21.4″ (31.5 cm)

Conceived circa 1911, cast 1965. The Comité Rodin states this model was cast in a single edition of 13 between 1963 and 1965 numbered 1-12 with cast 0 for the Museum Collection. There are no lifetime casts of this sculpture.

Provenance & Comité Rodin certificate available on request.

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

In Auguste Rodin’s later years, he took a keen interest in dance. As a highly successful artist, Rodin was at a point in his career when he could work for pleasure and focus his attention on creating art that he was passionate about. He had a large studio and a team of assistants helping with the creation of commercially successful pieces, as Antoinette le Normand-Romain states in her essay ‘Higher and Further: Rodin’s Late Works’; ‘the mind had replaced the hand in all but his more personal works.’ His Mouvements de Danse are very much ‘personal works’ which makes them all the more precious.

Rodin had been particularly stuck by the dancers at a performance in 1906 by the Royal Ballet of Cambodia. He said to a journalist afterwards ‘I am a man who has given his whole life to the study of nature and has been a constant admirer of the works of Antiquity. So imagine the effect on me of such a complete vision, which restored Antiquity to me while revealing mystery! …For my own part, I know that in watching them my vision has expanded: I have seen higher and further; I have learnt something.’ (Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement, 2016, p.18).

Royal Dancer Troupe Of King Sisowat In 1906. Taken By Joel G. Montague

Rodin was fascinated by a new generation of dancers such as Loie Fuller, Isadora Duncan and Vaslav Nijinsky. These dancers favoured free-flowing movements driven by emotion as opposed to the traditionally regimented and perfected style of ballet. This desire for freedom of expression and emotion in contrast to accuracy has often been present in Rodin’s work.

Isadora Duncan established a ‘temple’ to the cult of the Greek dance in Bellevue, near the sculptor’s studio in Meudon. Thanks to such proximity, Rodin was able to sketch her students’ movements, lamenting, ‘if I had only known such models when I was young. Models who move and whose movement is in close harmony with nature’.

At the same time, the artist was particularly enthralled by acrobat Alda Moreno, the model and companion of sculptor Jules Desbois. Between 1903 to 1913, Rodin sketched Moreno in unusual poses. The artist himself described his work stating that ‘some people find all this obscene. But it’s almost pure mathematics. It’s not driven by passion, or rather, it looks like the movements of unknown passions.’

Auguste Rodin, Female nude in profile holding her leg behind her head (Alda Moreno?),Musée Rodin, Paris

Le nu académique Journal of 1905, showing the newly discovered photos of Alda Moreno, Musée Rodin, Paris

The result of Rodin’s interest in dance was nine models, thought to have been inspired by Moreno, which the artist executed between 1910–1919, now known as Mouvements de Danse. Until 2016, when a major exhibition dedicated to these sculptures at The Courtauld Gallery, Rodin and Dance – The Essence of Movement, in partnership with the Musée Rodin, these pieces had been, for the most part, unexplored.

The Mouvements de Danse, originally entitled ‘études de movement (movement studies)’ by the Musée Rodin, were all modelled from two, simply rendered, headless clay figures, which were sectioned into parts so that they could be cast in plaster. These figures have been named ‘Alpha’ and ‘Beta.’ The separate limbs and torsos were then fashioned together, with some additions, to create a dozen or so different poses, now categorised alphabetically.

Auguste Rodin, Mouvement de Danse B and C

Rodin was primarily concerned with representing the physical structure of the pose and capturing the expression of movement, therefore extraneous details, including in some cases, the head, were irrelevant to him. This is also apparent in his drawings from the same period. The anatomical accuracy has been sacrificed in favour of expressiveness: the limbs at times seem boneless, and the hands and faces are suggested or suppressed in favour of the composition. Unlike Edgar Degas, who was well known for his study of ballerinas, Rodin’s dancers are completely stripped back without the sense of theatre or biography, that Degas’ work has.

Sculptures by Edgar Degas’ dancers in an exhibition at the Institut Valencià d’Art Modern

There is a rawness about Rodin’s Mouvements de Danse. They can be considered as three-dimensional sketches. The clay in which they were originally made was crudely rolled and the fingerprints and indentations of the artist’s tools can often be seen in the plaster casts. The movement is captured by omitting unnecessary anatomical details and enhanced further by the raw materiality of the sculptures. In the Mouvements de Danse we are truly seeing the artist’s hand.

For 1911 they were possibly too avant-garde, Picasso’s L’Acrobate painting perhaps is comparable, but that was not painted until 1930. The figures were not exhibited in Rodin’s lifetime, but in 1911 Rodin showed them to Count Harry Kessler, a German collector and patron. Kessler remarked that the pieces were ‘more similar to his drawings than to the sculptures he has made hitherto.’ (Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement, 2016, p.13). Kessler was keen to have bronze casts made of the figurines, but Rodin was reluctant to allow this, fearing his new ideas would be stolen by other artists.

Auguste Rodin, Mouvement de danse H, bronze, Signed A. Rodin and no.12 Inscribed Georges Rudier Fondeur Paris and © by Musée Rodin 1965, Bowman Sculpture

In the present work, Mouvement de danse H, the artist depicts the headless body of a dancer as kneeling on her right leg, leaning backwards, with her left leg stretched out upwards in front of her. Her arms are extended upwards, and in her right hand, she is holding an indeterminate object. Like Mouvements B and G, various orientations of the piece are possible. They can all rest comfortably on the horizontal as well as the vertical. Mouvement de danse H is formed from the ‘Beta’ figure from the original assemblage.

The plaster versions are all housed in the collection of the Musée Rodin, and some were exhibited there in 1919. All bronze versions were cast posthumously by the Museum, starting in 1945 by Alexis Rudier and later by his nephew Georges Rudier. Movements H and I were not cast until 1963.

The Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge has cast ‘No. 4’ with the foundry mark ‘G Rudier/fondeur Paris’, in their collection. Cast No. 11 is in the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. As with the present model, this piece was cast in 1965 by Georges Rudier Fondeur Paris on the authorisation of the Musée Rodin.

Auguste Rodin’s Mouvement de Danse H cast no. 11 in the Cantor Arts Center in Stanford University, US