Tagged — Jamie Lyons
Rodin didn't give a damn about your sensibilities. He took marble and bronze, dead matter, and made it sweat, made it gasp, made it want things it shouldn't want. Look at The Kiss and tell me that's just two people sitting around. That's flesh made permanent, desire carved into something that'll outlast every fumbling approximation of passion you or I will ever manage.
The guy was 40 before anyone gave a shit. Forty. Doing commercial sculpture, busts of rich people's ugly relatives, whatever paid the bills. Then he goes to Italy, sees Michelangelo, and comes back with this raw, unfinished aesthetic that made the establishment lose its collective mind. The Salon types wanted smooth, wanted classical, wanted safe. Rodin gave them The Age of Bronze, and they accused him of casting a live model because it was too goddamn real.
Here's the thing about Rodin: he understood that beauty isn't about perfection. It's about truth, even when truth is ugly, incomplete, tortured. His figures twist, they strain, they're caught mid motion like he grabbed them in the middle of being alive. The Burghers of Calais, six men walking to their execution, and every face tells you something different about how humans face death. No heroes, no martyrs, just people in their bodies dealing with the worst moment imaginable.
And The Gates of Hell? That obsession consumed thirty-seven years. Never finished it, kept pulling figures out of it, The Thinker, The Kiss, others, like he'd built this private inferno he could mine forever. Most artists chase completion. Rodin understood that some doors should stay open, some work should keep writhing.
He was messy, arrogant, probably impossible. But he made stone breathe.
Finca Fiasco 2022
Father’s Day, 2022. Lindsey’s taken us to Stanford, which is either the most perfect thing she could have done or the cruelest, depending on how you look at it. This is the place where my father taught. Where I grew up. Where I went to school. Every corner of this campus is a ghost, a […]
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Individualism 2018
The Condemned Men of Palo Alto So here’s the shot. Stanford’s quad, that cathedral to optimism and endowments, and right there in the middle: six bronze figures who understood that sometimes the price of collective survival is individual annihilation. Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. Cast number seven, if anyone’s counting. Look at them. 1347, their city […]
ReadThe City 2017
Museums are incredible places to fall in love. Or maybe just to realize you already have. Lindsey and I are at the Legion of Honor, standing in front of Klimt and Rodin, two guys who understood that the body is both temple and ruin, that desire is inseparable from decay, that gold leaf can’t hide […]
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Individualism 2013
Gsell: What astonishes me, is that your way is so different from that of other sculptors. They prose the model. Instead of that, you wait till a model has instinctively or accidentally taken an Interesting pose, and thon you reproduce It. Instead of your giving orders to the model, the model gives orders to you. […]
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