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He speaks to us of the intimacy, the intimate of creation, of the “bonhomme” whose body we don’t know how he lived, this massive yet small body, even for his time. A great man cannot have a small body ! Such was the position of the SGDL [1], one might even say that it made up a set of specifications. Rodin was pursued these specifications for a long time. Of course, for Rodin, betraying Balzac, or rather his body, was out of the question. In other words, realism. And it is with realism that their common ground lies.
The paradox of this sculpture is that we see it as realistic, which it is not. In a way, it’s the story of Balzac’s Les Paysans, a work that tells us of a countryside in the process of disappearing, while Zola’s La Terre, another realist artist, tells us of the birth of modern agriculture — which is at the root of our contemporary agricultural catastrophe. Both works are therefore only partially realistic, since they both overlook one aspect of reality.
The same is true of Rodin’s Balzac, which, despite extensive documentary research, went so far as to have a new frock coat made by Balzac’s tailor, and to immortalize a carriage driver who resembled Balzac. But it was never a realistic sculpture.
What is missing from the realism of Rodin’s early versions of Balzac ? More than size, it’s the author’s stature in the literary landscape. In this, despite some bad arguments, the SGDL is pointing out something essential : a monument to the honor of a personality must not only resemble its model, it must also speak to us of his stature. Is this still realism ?
From the 19th to the early 21st century, the West, directly or indirectly through its influence, populated cities around the world with statues dedicated to Great Men and sometimes Great Causes. Today, we’re unbolting them for the wrong reasons. Will we, like the members of the SGDL, achieve results on the scale of Rodin’s Balzac ? That’s another question, the answer to which is not up to us.
On the other hand, one wonders why Balzac’s robe is so prominently displayed. Is it a form of unbolting the statue of Balzac ? Is it debunking, because its proportions are more realistic than the final statue ; debunking, because despite the absence of the body, its presence is surprising ? Debunking the myth of the great man because Balzac chose to present himself to the world in this robe rather than the eternal three-piece suit customary at the time ? A strange choice for a dandy and author of several treatises on elegance, who asserted that “the toilet is really the whole man, the man with the text of his existence”. This robe is diametrically opposed to the elegance of Charles Baudelaire, another dandy. So why a robe ? Admittedly, it partially conceals the figure’s volume and smoothes out the relief, optically “enlarging” it. But this partial answer doesn’t say why he chooses to show his intimacy, to make this intimacy an extimacy, a position that runs counter to dandyism. The other paradox is that it tells us something about intimacy that, unless I’m mistaken, Balzac didn’t say much about. What does he have to say about the body and the use of dress to conceal or enhance, and about the functionality of dress ? These questions are far from secondary in the eyes of a dandy.
The statue of Balzac needs to be unbolted, because the fight against the SGDL and the romanticism of the cursed artist, overplayed by posterity, is suffocating Rodin’s work in the same way as The Thinker.
This statue of Balzac’s robe demonstrates the importance of the materials used to create a sculpture. In its own way, it is an ancestor of abstraction, yet it is the one that best speaks to us of the stature of the man who wore it. Like a photograph, it reveals the presence of absence. Finally, thanks to the tailors, it’s one of the very first art-science works, a forerunner of virtual objects, with its use of the technologies of the tailors of the time.
Pictures and texts © Hervé Bernard 2024