One can
understand that from this point of view very delightful sculpture, very
refined, very graceful, very perfectly understood within its limits, may
appear like _baudruche_--inflated gold-beater's skin, that is to say, of
which toy animals are made in France, and which has thus passed into
studio _argot_ as the figure for whatever lacks structure and substance.
Ask M. Rodin the explanation of a movement, an attitude, in one of his
works which strikes your convention-steeped sense as strange, and he
will account for it just as an anatomical demonstrator would--pointing
out its necessary derivation from some disposition of another part of
the figure, and not at all dwelling on its grace or its other purely
decorative felicity. Its artistic function in his eyes is to aid in
expressing fully and completely the whole of which it forms a part, not
to constitute a harmonious detail merely agreeable to the easily
satisfied eye. But then the whole will look anatomical rather than
artistic. There is the point exactly. Will it? I remember speculating
about this in conversation with M.
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