Art: Before Your Very Eyes

Here was lust and love, birth and creation, hell and despair; and each emotion showed not only on the faces but in every muscle of each arm and leg. The portrait busts seemed timeless, as if the sculptor knew no theme that was not eternal. The Auguste Rodin show at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art was near perfection—the superb work of a giant superbly installed. The public responded by joyously wallowing in the incredible vitality of bronze and stone bursting with life, of figures that writhed, embraced and entwined themselves. The critics were all superlatives, but the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke summed up the show best, though he spoke 50 years ago. "To create an image," he said, "meant to Rodin to seek eternity in a countenance. Rodin's conception of art was not to beautify but to separate the lasting from the transitory."

To the avant-garde of 20 years ago, Rodin was an overwrought sentimentalist. The great cubist sculptor Jacques Lipchitz (whose own retrospective is finishing a nationwide tour) ruefully recalls how appalled he was when someone told him that old Rodin had liked a Lipchitz sculpture. "What could be so wrong with my little sculpture that Rodin liked it?" he asked. But Lipchitz came to realize that though Rodin dealt with the human figure, he was breaking it down, exploring form, probing its mysteries much as the cubists were. Rodin's Walking Man, thought to be a study for one of the six figures in The Burghers of Calais or for St. John the Baptist Preaching, seems to stride by before the viewer's eye. Said Rodin: "The human body is a temple that marches. It is a moving architecture."

It is the happy duty of the museum to stand guard over the whole history of art and to make certain that what is good is never too long neglected. To an extent, the Museum of Modern Art and its excellent catalogue have performed this service for Rodin. The show that opened last week firmly established him as the father of modern sculpture, an artist who gave new movement to static form.