Exhibition of Drawings by M. Auguste Rodin

Nr. of pages: [PDF page number: 2].
Holding Institution: Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library Two page document does not contain catalogue entries, but mentiones the number of exhibited drawings.

[no author]: [no title], 2 p.

„In this exhibition an opportunity is, for the first time given the American public to study drawings by Rodin. The fifty-eight now shown were selected for this purpose by Rodin and Mr. Streichen. To aid in their fuller understanding we reprint from Arthur Symons' „Studies in siven arts“ the following extract from his sympathetic essay on Rodin:

„In the drawings, which constiute in themselves so interesting a development of his art, there is little of the delicacy of beauty, they are notes for the clay, 'instantanés,' and they note only movement, expression. The are done in two minutes, by a mere gallop of the hand over the paper, with the eyes fixed on some unconcious pose of the model, and here, it would seem (if indeed accident did not enter so largely into the matter) that a point in sentiment has been reached in which the perverse idealism of Baudelaire has disappeared, and a simpler kind of cynicism takes its place. In these astonishing drawings from the nude we see woman carried to a further point of simplicity than even in Degas: woman the animal; woman, in a strange sense, the idol. Not even the Japanese have simplified drawing to this illuminating scrawl of four lines, enclosing the whole mystery of the flesh. Each drawing indicates, as if in the rough block of stone, a single violent movement. Here a woman faces you, her legs thrown above her head; here she faces you with her legs thrust out before her, the soles of her feet seen close and gigantic. She squats like a toad, she stretches herself like a cat, she stands rigid, she lies abadoned. Every movement on her body, violently agitateb by the [n.p.]
Remembrance, or the expectation, or the act of desire, is seen at an expressive moment. She turns upon herself in a hundred attitudes, turning always upon the central pivot of the sex, which emphasizes itself with a fantastic and frightful monotony. The face is but just indicated, a face of wood, like a savage idol; and the body has rarely any of that elegance, seductiveness, and shivering delicacy of life which we find in the marble. It is a machine in movement, a monstrous, devastating machine, working mechanically, and possesssed interlace each other, flesh crushing upon flesh in all the exasperation of futile possession; and the energy of the embrace is indicated in the great hand that lies like a weight upon the shoulders. It is hideous, overpowering, and it has the beauty of all supreme energy.
And these drawings, with their violent simplicity of appeal, have the distinction of all abstract thought or form. Even in Degas there is a certain luxury, a possible low appeal, in those heavy and creased bodies bending in tubs and streaming a sponge over huddeled shoulders. But here luxury becomes geometrical; its axioms are demonstrated algebraically. It is the unknown x which sprawls, in this spawning entanglement of animal life, over the damped paper, between these pencil outlines, each done at a stroke, like a hard, sure stroke of the chisel.
For, it must be remembered, these are the drawings of a sculptor, notes for a sculpture, and thus indicating form as the sculptor sees it, with more brevity, in simpler outline, than the painter. They speak another language than the drawings of the painter, searching as they do, for the points that catch the lilght along a line, for the curves that indicate contour tangibly. In looking at the drawings of a painter, one seens color; here, in these shorthand notes of a sculptor, one's fingers seem actually to touch marble.“"

Exhibition information and text taken from two page announcement, stating the title, place and date of the exhibiton. The entries (58 drawings) are referred to in the text but not listed.