Musée Rodin

criticizes Cody's sculptures he has around the apartment.

It has them all out on the grounds like at the Rodin Museum in Paris where you actually have to...

It's really awesome where you walk from one of these sculptures to

the other outside.

Welcome to the Rodin Museum.

Auguste Rodin is one of the most significant sculptors in the history of art.

He is known for his deep understanding of the human soul and his ability to capture its emotions and anxieties using various materials.

I thought that already created a very interesting tension.

And then, you know, and then there was Rick Owens next door and you had Moulier, Les Fleuristes, and the Musée Rodin, not far away, and you had Les Invalides and La Seine.

And it was very interesting because all the vogues, apart from the local vogues, so Vogue Paris, at the time, now Vogue France, were there all together.

So basically what was happening at the time was like trying to coexist all together among countries as we are trying to do now.

preface

rodin has pronounced rilke's essay the supreme interpretation of his work a few years ago the sculptor expressed to the translators the wish that some day the book might be placed before the english-speaking public the appreciation was published originally as one of a series of art monographs under the editorship of the late richard to estimate and interpret the work of an artist is to be creatively just to him for this reason there are fewer critics than there are artists and criticism with but few exceptions is almost invariably negligible and futile the strongest and most procreant contact is that which takes place between two creative minds this book of rilke on rodin is the fruit of such a contact it ripened on the tree of a great friendship for the master for a number of years rilke lived close to rodin at seventy seven rue de varennes in the old mansion surrounded by a beautiful park which was subsequently dedicated to france by the artist and is now the musee de rodin here the young poet shared the life of the aged sculptor and his most silent hours rodin felt that rilke approached his sculpture from the same imaginative sphere whence his own creative impulse sprang he knew that in the pellucid and illuminating realm of the poetic his works found their spiritual home as their material manifestation partook of the atmosphere when placed under the open sky given wholly to the sun and wind and rain end of initial verse and translator's preface writers work through words sculptors through matter pomponius gauricus in his essay de sculptura about the hero is he who is immovably centred emerson rodin was solitary before fame came to him and afterward he became perhaps still more solitary for fame is ultimately but the summary of all misunderstandings that crystallize about a new name rodin's message and its significance are little understood by the many men who gathered about him it would be a long and weary task to enlighten them nor is this necessary for they assembled about the name not about the work a work that has grown far beyond this name's sound and limitations and that has become nameless as a plain is nameless or a sea that has a name but on the map in books and to men but which is in reality but distance movement and depth the work that is to be spoken of in these pages developed through long years it has grown like a forest and has not lost one hour one walks among these thousand forms overwhelmed with the imagination and the craftsmanship which they represent and involuntarily one looks for the two hands out of which this world has risen one thinks of how small man's hands are how soon they tire and how little time is given them to move and one longs to see these hands that have lived like a hundred hands like a nation of hands that rose before sunrise for the accomplishment of this work one asks for the man who directs these hands who is this man he is a man rich in years and his life is one that cannot be related it began and still continues stretches out deeply into a great age and to us it seems as though it had passed many hundreds of years ago it perhaps had a childhood a childhood in poverty dark groping and uncertain and maybe it possesses this childhood still for says st augustine somewhere whither should it have gone it holds perchance all its past hours the hours of expectation and abandonment the hours of doubt and the long hours of need it is a life that has lost nothing and has forgotten nothing a life that has absorbed all things as it passed for only out of such a life as this we believe could have risen such fulness and abundance of work only such a life as this in which everything is simultaneous and awake in which nothing passes unnoticed could remain young and strong and rise again and again to high creations perchance the time will come when some one will picture this life its details its episodes and its conflicts some one will tell a story of a child that often forgot to eat because it seemed more important to him to carve inferior wood with a cheap knife and some one will relate some event of the days of early manhood that contained promise of future greatness one of those incidents that are intimate and prophetic perhaps some such thought as that which five hundred years ago a monk expressed to young michael colomb may have suggested itself to rodin on one of the crossways at the beginning of his work travail petit regardes tu ton sol et les clochers au jour de st paul et les belles ouvres des compagnons regarde aime le bon dieu et tu auras la grace des grandes choses and thou wilt have the grace of the great things for it was just that which rodin was seeking the grace of the great things the galleries of the louvre revealed to the young artist radiant visions of the antique world visions of southern skies and of the sea and far beyond rose heavy stone monuments reaching over from immemorial civilizations into times not yet existent there were stones that lay as if asleep but that held a suggestion that they would awake on some last judgment day stones on which there was nothing mortal there were others that bore a movement a gesture that had remained as fresh as though it had been caught there in order to be given to some child that was passing by not alone in the great works and in these monuments was this vitality alive the unnoticed the small the concealed were not less filled with this deep inward excitement with this rich and surprising unrest of living things even stillness where there was stillness consisted of hundreds and hundreds of moments of motion that kept their equilibrium there were small figures animals particularly that moved stretched or curled and although a bird perched quietly it contained the element of flight a sky grew back of it and hung about it the far distance was folded down on each of its feathers and should these feathers spread out like wings the wide expanse of them would be quite great there was stillness in the stunted animals that stood to support the cornices of the cathedrals or cowered and cringed beneath the consoles too inert to bear the weight and there were dogs and squirrels woodpeckers and lizards tortoises rats and snakes at least one of each kind these creatures seem to have been caught in the open in the forest and on roads and the compulsion to live under stone tendrils flowers and leaves must have changed them slowly into what they were now and were to remain forever But other animals could be found that were born in this petrified environment without remembrance of a former existence.

They were entirely the natives of this erect, rising, steeply ascending world.

Over skeleton-like arches they stood in their fanatic meagerness, with mouths open like those of pigeons, shrieking for the nearness of the bells had destroyed their hearing.

And then there's

one in the Rodin Museum in Paris.

This is the closest to your being able to walk around it at street level, but it's still nothing like it.

And they should really have listened to Rodin.

We had some amazing food there.

The Rodin Museum was my favorite place.

I don't know why, but seeing the gates of hell in real life was just, kind of unnerving and amazing and cool from an art experience standpoint.

But I need to go back and give it another chance.