Auguste Rodin The Kiss 4 October 2011 – 2 September 2012

Auguste Rodin
The Kiss
4 October 2011 –
2 September 2012
The Kiss
The Kiss, now a universally recognised sign
of youthful, self-contained love, began its life in
1882 as a portrayal of Paulo and Francesca, one
of the figure groups Auguste Rodin (1840–1917)
intended to use within his first state commission:
large doors for a future museum of decorative
arts in Paris. Rodin developed his imagery by
making quick sketches on paper and in clay,
envisaging the huge seven metre high double door
divided into panels, each part filled with scenes
from Dante’s Divine Comedy. The figures would be
naked as in the art of classical antiquity. Many of
the artist’s initial ideas favoured two people in
contact with each other – a mother and child, a
centaur abducting a woman or even Dante, the
narrator, in the arms of the poet Virgil recoiling
from the frightening sights witnessed as the two
men descend the Circles of Hell. The 13th century
story of Paulo and Francesca, like that of Romeo
and Juliet, was popular in the 19th century.
Francesca was married to Gianciotto Malatesta,
Lord of Rimini, who asked his younger brother
Paulo (also married) to entertain his wife. As they
sat reading tales of courtly love, they dwelt on the
romance of Lancelot and Guinevere and their
love for each other emerged. The book falls from
Paolo’s hand at the moment of their first kiss,
but just then, as the lines in Canto V describe,
Gianciotto surprised the couple and stabbed
them to death.
Rodin, already in his forties when he began
this commission, the Gates of Hell, was awarded
an official studio and funds to hire models and
assistants. Ideas came rapidly with the
opportunity to work from life (or ‘nature’ as he
described the model) and he began to experiment
with placing the figures. One reporter described
‘the rapidity of spontaneous creation, a countless
host of damned women came into being and
writhed in his fingers. Some of them lived for a
few hours before being returned to the mass of
reworked clay’. Although the Gates of Hell was
largely realised by 1885, Rodin kept the work in
his studio at the rue de l’Université for the rest
of his life (the plans for the new museum had
been abandoned) and it was only cast in bronze
after his death.
In the early 1880s visitors to the studio
described seeing Paulo and Francesca in place
on the left hand panel, opposite Ugolino and Sons.
Photographs were taken of the beautiful work,
measuring 87 cm high, while still on the modelling
stand. However, by 1885 Rodin had decided this
entwined couple with their gentle embrace was
incompatible with the overall mood of tortured,
guilty love and that its spiral form worked better
in the round than as bas-relief. Along with other
figure groups, he began to display Paulo and
Francesca, and a plaster and a bronze version
appeared in commercial galleries in Paris and
Brussels in 1887. While some critics complained
that the lack of costume made the story obscure,
they and the visitors were largely won over. The
critic Solvay enthused, ‘this adorable group of
lovers, as naked as the day they were born, that
should simply have been called The Kiss or
nothing at all’.
The new name was adopted by Rodin.
At the beginning of 1888 the Ministry of Fine Arts
decided to order two large marble versions,
intending one to be shown at the Exposition
Universelle in Paris the following year before being
acquired by the state collection of contemporary
art. By this time Rodin was preoccupied with
other projects, like the Burghers of Calais, and
instead of modelling a life-sized version himself,
he asked his assistant Jean Turcan to enlarge the
existing work, using the pointing techniques that
marble carvers had developed. Turcan, perhaps
due to illness, failed to deliver and the unfinished
Kiss remained in the studio until 1898 when Rodin
decided to exhibit it in the annual Salon. His other
entry was the controversial statue of the writer
Balzac, a huge monolithic figure, his body cloaked
in a monk’s robe. While this radically modern work
was ridiculed, The Kiss became so popular that it
was soon reproduced by several foundries in
various sizes in bronze, indeed more than 1000
casts, some of these reductions, were made in
Rodin’s lifetime.
In 1900 the Bostonian art connoisseur
Edward Perry Warren saw the work at the
current Exposition Universelle and decided
to commission another marble for his private
collection. Warren, who lived in Lewes, East
Sussex, stipulated that the man’s genitals should
be more evident, carved as ‘a Greek would have
done’ (they are slightly so). Executed by the
carvers Ganier, Rigaud and Mather in Pentelic
marble, the over-life sized marble was too large to
fit inside his house and had to be stored in their
stable block and later in the Town Hall until it was
returned to their home during the First World War,
covered with bales of hay to protect it from shells.
In the context of Warren’s rather eccentric life
(and his openly gay relationship with the
archaeologist John Marshall) the ‘British’ Kiss
became rather infamous after his death and was
virtually unwanted until it was purchased by
subscription by the Tate Gallery in 1953.
Much as it would be exciting to connect
The Kiss with Rodin’s own romantic life,
particularly his affair with the sculptor Camille
Claudel, it was begun before they met. On the
other hand it is contemporary with even more
liberated, original works like Crouching Woman for
which a favourite Italian model Adèle Abruzzesi
posed. These works, some with titles linked to
Baudelaire’s verses, are testimony to Rodin’s
unprecedented way of observing female sexuality
with great empathy and openness. In contrast
with other sculptors, Rodin deliberately left
visible the material part of modelling, the marks
of his fingers and tools as they shaped form, the
traces of the wet plaster and the piece mould
from the next stage. He instructed the carvers
not to obscure the unfinished look of roughly
chiselled marble. The living evidence of process
was part of the artist’s way of equating manual
and sexual energy with creative thought. In a
sense The Kiss is a companion piece to Rodin’s
other iconic work The Thinker, an introspective,
solitary figure placed at the top of the Gates,
brooding over the chaos and unhappiness caused
by the passionate, wilful impulses of mankind.
Catherine Lampert is a curator and an
art historian, author of Rodin: Sculpture and
Drawings, Arts Council/Yale 1987 and co-author
of Rodin, Royal Academy 2006. She is currently
curating an Honoré Daumier exhibition for the
Royal Academy.
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Auguste Rodin, The Kiss, 1901–4.
Pentelican marble. © Tate: Purchased
with assistance from The Art Fund and
public contributions 1953