The exhibition space at the Courtauld Gallery is relatively small, just a little ante-room and a larger hall-shaped room. In these two spaces the gallery is hosting a scholarly exhibition devoted to a series of small sculptures of dancers created by the great French sculptor Auguste Rodin and titled Mouvements de Danse (Dance movements).
Room one
From around 1900, Rodin (1840 to 1917), by then the most famous and successful sculptor in France, became interested in the new wave of dance styles which were coming into fashion. A bit later this was to include the Ballets Russe around 1912, but the first room focuses on the 1906 Colonial Exhibition in Paris, which featured the first ever appearance in Europe of the Royal Cambodian dancers.
Photos and postcards show what appear to be children in ornate Cambodian costume, but it was their postures and movement which captivated Rodin. The exhibition includes Rodin’s eloquent prose descriptions which make clear that he was fascinated by their new ways of posing the human figure – knees bent, arms bent with hands folded back, to create strange expressive patterns. Combine this with an odd staccato way of moving, and an odd rippling wavelike motion of their limbs, and Rodin (and fellow Parisians) were taken by storm.
These highly stylised poses and movements are reminiscent of Indian sculpture and another display case contains photos of statues of the Hindu god Shiva, which also fascinated Rodin. Here and elsewhere the inclusion of Rodin’s written descriptions of the body and of these dance poses testify to his technical, anatomical interest in the design and dynamic, the posture and flexing and movement of the human body and how to capture it on paper or sculpture.
The first room also explains the new, more expressive dance styles, breaking free of traditional Western ballet styles, which were being introduced by pioneers like Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller and Ruth St Denis. There’s a photo of each of them (Duncan photographed dancing at a party given for Rodin, in his garden). The best one is of Loïe Fuller who, apparently, used bamboo canes to ‘extend’ her arms and support great swathes of dress material so that she looked like a dervish in movement.
In the 1900s Rodin was particularly close to an artists’ model and dancer named Alda Moreno. He made scores of sketches of her. The exhibition displays nude shots of Moreno from a publication, Le Nu Academique.
Le nu académique Journal of 1905 showing the newly discovered photos of Alda Moreno in the pose of ‘Dance Movement A’. (30 June) 1905 © Agence photographique du musée Rodin / Pauline Hisbacq
This is just one of the Moreno poses which appear in the many sketches Rodin made and which line the second, larger room.
Standing Nude Holding Her Right Leg by Auguste Rodin (c.1903) Musée Rodin, Paris, France
Dance movements
All this is by way of lead-up to the series of Dance Movements themselves. These are twelve relatively small (about a foot high) sculptures in plaster of a naked woman dancer in a series of poses. They have been placed in a display case in the centre of the room so we can see them fully in the round. They are ‘numbered’ from A to G. This is ‘the first complete presentation of the whole series in terracotta and plaster, including related drawings’ – a historic opportunity to see them all together.
Dance Movement A by Auguste Rodin (c.1911) Musée Rodin, Paris, France
A separate case explains that Rodin made the figurines using a new technique. He modelled in clay two master poses, labelled Alpha and Beta. Then he dismembered these ‘bodies’ to produce a set of nine body parts, mainly arms and legs. Then he used the parts to assemble his set of 12. The commentary points out that he was experimenting with a new way of ‘assembling’ sculptures to reflect the new ‘experimental’ forms of dance which he was trying to capture. I found them a beguiling combination of the rough and read, and the highly expressive.
Dance Movement D by Auguste Rodin (c.1911) Musée Rodin, Paris, France
The Dance Movements were among the most private and experimental of Rodin’s later works. He only showed them to visitors to his studio and patrons, who commented on their rawness and energy.
On the whole I think I didn’t like them, because overall I don’t really like the rough finish and blockiness of Rodin’s style. But the small size and unexpected detail of some of them overcame that prejudice, and I did warm to several of the little figures. In fact the more I looked, the more energy I found, packed into these rough, half-finished figures.
Dance Movement I by Auguste Rodin (c.1911) Musée Rodin, Paris, France
The twelve little figurines are in the middle of a room are offset by thirty or so sketches, drawings and gouaches which hang around the walls. These were a very mixed bag ranging from the briefest of sketches, to pieces which were thoroughly worked over with multiple lines. Others – later works apparently – used heavy charcoal pencils whose lines he then smudged to create a sense of depth and dimensionality.
Seated nude folding forward by Auguste Rodin (1910/11) Musée Rodin, Paris, France
And there were others where he’d used watercolour or gouache to simplify the outlines and create depth and contrast. In these I liked the way the colours bled over the pencil marks, creating a further level – a colour level – of discrepancy and dynamism – as in this painting of a Cambodian dancer.
Cambodian Dancer in Profile by Auguste Rodin (1906/7) Musée Rodin, Paris, France
Nijinsky
Off to one side is a mini-display devoted to the famous Russian avant-garde dancer, Vassily Nijinsky. Rodin was taken to see the Ballets Russes production of L’Après-midi d’un faun in May 1912 (the show includes a brilliant photo of Nijinsky wearing the parti-coloured outfit created for that role, and in one of his weird hieratic poses). Afterwards Rodin invited Diaghilev and Nijinsky to his studio and then Nijinsky stayed on to be modelled by the great sculptor.
Sketches survived but the cast for a small figure of Nijinsky was only discovered after the sculptor’s death, and only finally cast in bronze in 1957. To quote the Guardian‘s Judith Mackrell:
In the bunched up force of the curving torso and lifted leg, in the torsion of the neck and in the feral, almost goatish cast to Nijinsky’s features, Rodin captured something of the explosive impact the dancer made when he first appeared on the ballet stages of Europe.
Arguably this is the best thing in the exhibition, maybe because it is the most finished. I also like it because it most obviously connects to the Futurist, Vorticist, Cubist and Modernist sculpture which was just about to burst on the world – for example, Umberto Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space from 1913 currently in Tate Modern.
By contrast with this one hyper-modern work, the Alda Moreno pieces still seemed to cling to an essentially 19th century idiom.
But they are, nonetheless, records of a fascinating experiment, and this rare opportunity to see them all lined up in sequence is a rare opportunity to enter the thinking and vision of a man fascinated by the shape and pattern and texture and movement and expressiveness of the stretching, straining, leaping, constantly moving human body.
Related links
- Rodin and Dance continues at the Courtauld Gallery until 22 January 2017
- Evening Standard review by Matthew Collings
- Financial Times review by Louise Levene
- Guardian review by Judith Mackrell
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