Cambodian Dancers, Rodin

não foi Rodin ao Cambodja, mas foi o contrário, em Paris.

 "On 10 July 1906, Rodin, aged 66, attended a performance given in the Pré-Catelan, Paris, by a troupe of Cambodian dancers, who had accompanied King Sisowath of Cambodia on his official visit to France. Enthralled by the beauty of these dancers and the novelty of their movements, Rodin followed them to Marseilles to be able to make as many drawings of them as possible before they left the country on 20 July. They made a deep impression on the artist, as he confided to Georges Bourdon, in an article for the newspaper Le Figaro on 1 August 1906:“There is an extraordinary beauty, a perfect beauty, about these slow, monotonous dances, which follow the pulsating rhythm of the music… [The Cambodians] have taught me movements I had never come across anywhere before…” Rodin used gouache (ochre for the graceful arms and head, deep blue for the tunic draping the body), applied in broad brush strokes over and beyond the contour lines, to amend and rectify the initial pencil drawing of this crouching dancer’s hieratic pose. All the details are eliminated (garments, face, hairstyle…).All that remains is the concentrated energy of the graceful, eloquent, age-old gestures. “In short,” concluded Rodin, “if they are beautiful, it is because they have a natural way of producing the right movements…"
do museu Rodin.

estes foram estudos de movimento. em outros desenhos, o movimento inicial era desenhado e depois passado para uma segunda versão mais perfeita e com maior detalhe, como aqui.

antes de ir para a urgência, tinha-me intrigado esta imagem no quarto do Tivoli no Oriente, inserida numa decoração desmaiada.





Rodin, de Rilke (o obscuro, em leve piada pessoal).
as linhas captavam o movimento.

assim escreve Rilke, o secretário do artista:

Rodin's Late Drawings

Rodin had drawn all his life, but the drawings he made from around the turn of the century (when he was sixty) to his death in 1917 are particularly distinctive. There are around 8,000 of them. Made either with pencil alone, or with the addition of pen and ink or colour washes, these late drawings are images of the most refined simplicity and concise beauty. They can be divided in two types: female dancers, in particular Javanese and Cambodian dancers, and nude female models. Both types were made very quickly, in pencil, from life; some were worked up later. A few were made by tracing from the original onto another sheet, eliminating any superfluous lines as a further means of simplification. Others were cut out and recombined with other figures. This process was highly unusual - both for its speed and freedom. Rodin did not look at the page while he was working. Neither did he ask his models to hold any particular pose. Instead he drew as they moved freely around him, letting each finished sheet fall to the floor as he began another. The daring poses, unique perspectives and bold distortions that resulted are extraordinary. This very innovative way of working coincided with Rodin's obsession with modern dance during this late period. In an article published in 1912, he claimed that 'dance has always had the prerogative of eroticism in our society. In this, as in other expressions of the modern spirit, women are responsible for the renewal'. Isadora Duncan, Loïe Fuller, Diaghilev, Nijinsky, the Japanese actress Hanako, all knew him and posed for him. Isadora Duncan opened a ballet school and brought her students to Rodin's studio so that he could draw them. In 1906, Rodin followed a group of Cambodian dancers to Marseille for the same purpose. His ecstatic response to these various dancers' elegant and liberated movement found expression in sculptural form as well as in drawings. When dancers were not available to draw, Rodin was wealthy enough to employ models. Many of these drawings of nude models are of an intensely erotic nature; the ones illustrated here are amongst them. They are unlike any of his other works. Rodin also had produced erotic drawings for book illustrations. He had provided drawings for a privately printed edition of Baudelaire's Flowers of Evil (1885) and for a limited folio edition of Octave Mirbeau's Garden of Pain. (...)

(deste livro)

Rilke e Rodin incompatibilizam-se durante ano e meio. os desenhos de fim de vida de um quase testemunham o início da carreira do outro, em Viena, na livraria de Hugo Heller, o editor de Freud.

"There was a pleasant surprise on his return. In his mail, forwarded to his Prague hotel, Rilke found a flattering note from Auguste Rodin, asking his opinion of a Viennese bookseller, Hugo Heller, who had been recommeded by Hofmannsthal as a suitable exhibitor for Rodin's drawings of Cambodian dancers. Rilke was glad to give good news: he was slated to conduct his own readings in the same shop. Clearly, one and a half years after their break, Rodin was ready to mend fences.
Following a livelier appearance in Breslau, Rilke arrived on November 8 for his performances in Vienna. On his first evening he gave a reading in Heller's bookshop, which would soon feature Rodin's Cambodian dancers. Rilke's repertoire that evening included the chamberlain's death in Malte as well as selections from his more recent poetry.
A brief interlude threatened to mar the occasion. Just as he started reading, Rilke was jolted by a violent nosebleed, possibly brought on by the strain of traveling. But the bleeding stopped after he had briefly withdrawn to the washroom, and he did not have to accept Hofmannsthal's offer to read his poems for him.
The evening marked the beginning of Rilke's stardom. With a black cloak flung about his shoulders, he looked both distinguished and strangely aesthetic. People crowded around him after the reading to shake his hand."
do livro Life of a Poet: Reiner Maria Rilke de Ralph Freedman.