Factsheet

LE CLAIRE
SEIT 1982
KUNST
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LE CLAIRE
SEIT 1982
KUNST
AUGUSTE RODIN
1840 Paris - Meudon 1917
Danseuse Cambodgienne de face, croquis en bas à gauche d’une demi-jambe
Graphite and watercolour on thin wove paper. 1906.
Signed in pencil lower right: Aug. Rodin.
271 x 197 mm
PROVENANCE: Hans Bethge [acquired from the artist; bearing the collector’s stamp on the verso] –
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff [with his estate stamp on the verso] - Thence by descent
The dance could hardly fail to provide Rodin with observational and inspirational opportunities not
present at conventional studio sessions with posed models. Oriental dance first excited his
imagination when he witnessed a Javanese dance troupe perform at the Exposition Universelle in
Paris in 1889. His interest was further stimulated when he attended a performance by Cambodian
dancers on 10 July 1906. The dancers were accompanying King Sisowath, the young monarch of
Cambodia, on a state visit to France. Rodin saw the performance at the Pré Catelan in the Bois de
Boulogne and then followed the troupe to Marseilles where the dancers were scheduled to perform
at the Exposition Coloniale Internationale. I watched them ecstatically, he told Louis Vauxcelles, What a void
they left in me when they travelled on – I was in the dark and the cold, I felt they had taken all the beauty of the world with
them […]. I followed them to Marseilles; and would have followed them to Cairo! 1
In Marseilles Rodin had only a few days before the dancers set out on their return voyage. But he was
able to sketch them in the gardens of the Villa des Glycines where they were staying. Émile San
Remo, a Marseilles photographer, documented these sketching sessions [Fig. 1]. Describing the
sessions, Rodin wrote: With my enchanting friends I have spent the four most beautiful days of my life [... ]. They have
brought antiquity back to life for me. In reality they have shown me all the fine gestures and all the fine movements of the
human body which the ancients were able to capture so well in their images. [... ]. These monotone and slow dances that follow
such strange musical rhythms possess an extraordinarily perfect beauty that resembles the beauty of [ancient] Greece but with
a very special character of its own. The Cambodian dancers have introduced me to movements that I have yet to find elsewhere,
whether in sculpture or in nature. 2
1
Louis Vauxcelles, citing Rodin in his preface to the catalogue of the exhibition Dessins d’Auguste Rodin held at the Galerie
Devambez in Paris in 1908: Je les ai contemplées en extase […]. Quel vide elles m’ont laissé! Quand elles partirent, je fus dans l’ombre et le froid,
je crus qu’elles emportaient la beauté du monde […]. Je les suivis à Marseille; et je les aurais suivies jusqu’au Caire! – Raphaël Masson, ‘Sources
of Inspiration’, in Raphaël Masson and Véronique Matussi, Rodin, Musée Rodin, Paris 2004, pp. 173-4.
2
Ich habe mit meinen niedlichen Freundinnen die vier schönsten Tage meines Lebens verbracht [...]. Sie haben für mich die Antike wieder aufleben
lassen. Sie haben mir in der Wirklichkeit die schönen Gesten, die schönen Bewegungen des menschlichen Körpers gezeigt, die die Alten im Bilde
festzuhalten verstanden. [...] Diese monotonen und langsamen Tänze, die dem Rhythmus einer seltsamen Musik folgen, haben eine außerordentliche, eine
vollkommene Schönheit, die der griechischen Schönheit gleicht, aber doch ihren besonderen Charakter hat. Durch die Tänzerinnen von Kambodscha habe
ich Bewegungen kennengelernt, die ich noch nirgends gefunden hatte, weder in der Bildhauerkunst noch in der Natur. Auguste Rodin,
‘Äußerungen über die Kambodschanischen Tänzerinnen’, in Kunst und Künstler, IV, Berlin 1906, pp. 531-2 (comments by
Rodin cited by Georges Bourdon in ‘Rodin et les petites princesses jaunes’, published in Le Figaro, 1 August 1906).
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In the sketching sessions Rodin produced a highly important corpus of 150 drawings. About a
hundred of them are sketches of individual dancers. But there are also studies of hands and arms, and
sketches depicting a number of dancers on a single sheet. In addition, there are portraits of the king,
members of his family and his court. Not all the sketches were executed in Marseilles from life. Many
of the sheets show traces of later reworking. The art historian J. A. Schmoll Eisenwerth has suggested
that Rodin may well have applied watercolour later. What is so remarkable about these drawings is
their extraordinary spontaneity and weightlessness. They constitute one of Rodin’s outstanding
achievements.
In the present drawing the figure of the dancer appears to hover in undefined space. The curve of her
outstretched arms creates a wavelike movement that flows over her shoulders and chest. As in
Cambodian dance tradition the movement of the hands is stylized, the palms arched and the long,
slender fingers splayed. Like many of Rodin’s other drawings of Cambodian dancers, the present
work is on thin wove paper.
In the context of the exhibition Rodin et les danseuses cambodgiennes. Sa dernière passion held at the musée
Rodin in 2006, Christina Buley-Uribe identified typological differences within the group of 100
drawings of individual dancers. Systematic examination of the drawings led her to divide them into
ten groups (A - J). 3 In a written statement dated 10 February 2016 reconfirming the authenticity of
the present watercolour she gives it firmly and unequivocally to the group defined as ‘Group I’. The
distinctive features of the work – particularly the fluid, heavily diluted watercolour wash, sparing use
of colour and orangey flesh tones – are entirely consistent with those of the drawings assigned to
Group I. She writes: In this drawing, as in other sheets from Group I held at the musée Rodin (inv. D. 4433, D. 4434 and
D. 4514) [Figs. 2-4], Rodin encapsulates the movement of the arms and legs with extraordinary economy of means. Here, only
the head and arms are accentuated while the contrasting pallidity of the tunic-like clothing […] recalls the neutral whites and
greys of classical togas. The musée holds a further drawing (inv. D. 4469) [Fig. 5] which displays a marginal sketch of a foot
and lower leg that closely resembles the marginal sketch in the Bethge drawing.4
The drawings of Cambodian dancers not only mark a high point in Rodin’s late oeuvre, they also
constitute the culmination of a remarkable artistic career. The drawings, despite their frequently
cursory, ethereal quality, show him at the peak of his powers as a draughtsman and colourist. They
are outstanding depictions of oriental dance tradition. 5
Rilke worked as Rodin’s private secretary at his Meudon studio and residence, the Villa des Brillants,
from September 1905 to May 1906. He visited the exhibition of drawings at the Galerie BernheimJeune in Paris in 1907, noting: One might call them [the Cambodgiennes] ‘herbarium’ sheets, going from one to the next.
Here flowers have been preserved and through careful drying their random characteristics have been compressed with a
definitive intensity that reveals their very being – like a symbol. 6 This in confirmation of an annotation he had
noticed in Rodin’s hand in the margin of one of the drawings, namely: fleur humaine. 7
3
Christina Buley-Uribe, Rodin et les danseuses cambodgiennes. Sa dernière passion, exhib. cat., Musée Rodin, Paris 2006, pp. 59 f.
Buley-Uribe in a written statement dated 10 February 2016.
5
J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, Kambodschanische Tänzerinnen, in Auguste Rodin, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, exhib. cat., Münster,
Westfälisches Landesmuseum für Kunst und Kulturgeschichte, 1984, p. 397.
6
Herbarium-Blätter, möchte man sagen, wenn man so von einem zum anderen geht. Blumen sind da aufbewahrt worden und haben, bei vorsichtigem
Vertrocknen, ihre unwillkürliche Gebärde zu einer endgültigen Intensität zusammengezogen, die ihr ganzes Gewesensein wie in einem Zeichen enthält.
4
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Hans Bethge, a former owner of the watercolour, was born in Dessau in 1876 and moved to Berlin in
1901. 8 He cultivated friendships with many of the leading writers and artists of the period, among
them Julius Meier-Graefe, Rainer-Maria Rilke, Heinrich Vogeler, Karl Hofer, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff
and Wilhelm Lehmbruck. He met Rodin through Rilke and the influential art historian and critic
Otto Grautoff (1876-1937), visiting Rodin’s Meudon studio in spring 1909. Aptly named the ‘musée
Rodin’, the Villa served Rodin as exhibition space for his plaster casts, sculptures and collection of
antiquities. Bethge described his visit in an article published in the journal Die Hilfe on 12 December
1909. 9 That Bethge should end his article with a discussion of the danseuses cambodgiennes strongly
suggests that he saw and acquired the present drawing on this visit. Whether he purchased the
drawing or whether it was given to him as a gift by Rodin is unclear. The acquisition may have been
prompted by Grautoff’s positive response to Rodin’s Cambodgiennes, and his comments in the press and
in his own book on Rodin published a year earlier. 10 Records show that Rodin and Bethge remained
in contact. Bethge wrote to Rodin a year later on behalf of the German painter Fritz Mackensen
(1866-1953), the director of the Academy of Fine Art in Weimar, who had requested an introduction. 11
Christina Buley-Uribe confirmed the authenticity of this drawing in a letter dated 10 April 2011. She
will include the work in the Catalogue raisonné des dessins et peintures d’Auguste Rodin. It has been assigned the
catalogue raisonné number 11043.
Fig. 1: Émile San Remo, Rodin drawing a Cambodian dancer in Marseilles, 1906, photograph
Otto Grautoff and Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Rodins Zeichnungen’, in Kunst und Künstler, VII, Berlin 1908-9, p. 224. The exhibition
at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune was the first exhibition solely of Rodin’s drawings.
7
Cinq études de danseuses cambodgiennes, Musée Rodin, Paris [inv. D. 4517]. – J. A. Schmoll gen. Eisenwerth, op. cit., p. 398.
8
Hans Bethge (1876-1946). See Eberhard Gilbert Bethge, Hans Bethge. Leben und Werk. Eine Biographie, 3rd edition, Kelkheim 2002.
9
Hans Bethge, Bei Rodin, in supplement to Die Hilfe, y. 15/50, Berlin, 12 December 1909, pp. 801-2.
10
Grautoff and Rilke, op. cit., pp. 218-25;. Grautoff, Auguste Rodin, Bielefeld and Leipzig 1908.
11
Monsieur Rodin! You had the kindness to receive me at the Musée Rodin in the spring of last year after Mr. Grautoff had given me a few lines
addressed to you. This time Professor Mackensen, Director of the Grand Ducal Academy of Fine Art in Weimar, has a great desire to see the museum
and I beg you to receive him since he would be most happy to view your marbles and drawings. (1910). The letter is now in the collection of
the Musée Rodin in Paris.
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Fig. 2: D. 4433 - 296 x 199 mm
Fig. 3: D. 4434 - 319 x 247 mm
Fig. 4: D. 4514 - 299 x 200 mm
Fig. 5: D. 4469 - 310 x 167 mm
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