You Must Change Your Life

by Rachel Corbett

  Perhaps it was during those long hours sitting for Rodin that Shaw first developed his sympathies for artists’ models. A few years later he would rewrite the Greek myth of Pygmalion, an artist who fell in love with his own sculpture, but from the point of view of the model. Shaw named this figure Eliza Doolittle.

  Despite Shaw’s admiration for Rodin’s work, the two men were opposing personalities from the start. Shaw was a playful raconteur and Rodin was virtually humorless, especially in those days. During the countless hours they spent together, Shaw recalled seeing the sculptor laugh only once—a light chuckle when he watched Shaw feed half his dessert to Rodin’s dog, Kap.

  But because Shaw refused to take anything seriously, Rodin’s severity became all the more amusing to him. Seated in a child’s chair, Shaw fought back laughter while Rodin spat water onto the clay head without noticing that it also splattered the man posed behind it. He watched with “indescribable delight” as Rodin whacked creases away with his spatula and, once, sliced through the neck with a wire and tossed the decapitated head casually aside.

  Shaw’s attempts to crack jokes through his broken French did nothing to ease matters. When someone once asked Rodin what the two men talked about during their sessions, he replied, “M. Shaw does not speak French well, but he expresses himself with such violence that he makes an impression.” Rodin, whose English was even worse than Shaw’s French, confused everyone when he pronounced the name of his sitter, “Bernarre Chuv.”

  Rilke was as ignorant of English literature as Rodin, but he found Shaw to be a far more entertaining guest. He thought the man was every bit as clever as Oscar Wilde, but with none of the pretension. As the originally planned sittings stretched out into three weeks, he also became impressed by him as a model. Rather than merely standing still, Shaw stood with purpose and determination, like a column that supports more than its own weight. Soon Shaw was spending many of those afternoons chatting with Rilke instead of Rodin.

  Rilke began to wonder if perhaps Shaw should be the subject of his next work. He wrote a letter to the playwright’s publisher, praising the man as an excellent, energetic model. “Rarely has a likeness in the making had so much help from the subject of it as this,” he said. He then asked whether they might send him some of Shaw’s books so he could consider writing about them.

  At last, Rodin received some news to lighten his mood that spring. A committee of prominent artists, politicians and the president of the Society of Men and Letters, which had previously rejected Rodin’s Balzac, united in support of installing The Thinker at the Panthéon. The committee overpowered Rodin’s critics and the statue was officially unveiled on April 21.

  Rilke sat with Shaw and his wife during the celebration. They watched the city’s arts undersecretary Henri Dujardin-Beaumetz welcome The Thinker and Rodin with a lofty speech. After years of misunderstanding, “this truly creative artist, so shaped by humanity and conviction, is finally able to work peacefully in the shining light of universal admiration,” he said.

  Joining the group for the festivities was Shaw’s friend Alvin Langdon Coburn, an artist who had come from London to photograph Rodin. Shaw, who was an amateur photographer himself, had been carrying around a box camera in Meudon when Rodin noticed it and invited him to take as many pictures as he liked. Shaw shot one photo of Rilke leaning against a stone rail in Meudon, looking heavy-lidded and worn. But when it came to capturing Rodin, Shaw told Coburn that he ought to be the one to do it. “No photograph yet taken has touched him: Steichen was right to give him up and silhouette him. He is by a million chalks the biggest man you ever saw; all your other sitters are only fit to make gelatin to emulsify for his negative.”

  Coburn jumped at the opportunity. He took dozens of photographs over the next few days, of Rodin, his art, and one of the sculptor and Shaw together with the bust-in-progress standing between them. Shaw had not overstated his description of Rodin, Coburn thought. “He looked like an ancient patriarch, or prophet.”

  On Shaw’s last day in Paris, he was preparing a bath when an idea came to him. Once he got out of the tub, he told Coburn to take a photo of him assuming the pose of The Thinker—but nude. The men laughed while Coburn took the shot and then they boarded the next train back to England.

  When the photo went on view at the London Salon later that year, critics responded with revulsion and disbelief that Shaw would participate in such a shameful portrayal. He tried to defend himself by saying that busts conveyed only a person’s reputation, while full-body portraits showed nothing “except their suits of clothes with their heads sticking out; and what is the use of that?” This photo showed Shaw as he really looked. Or perhaps it was simply a joke that spiraled out of hand.

  Shaw was stunned when he laid his eyes on the three completed busts—in plaster, bronze and “luminous” marble. “He saw me. Nobody else has done that yet,” Shaw said of Rodin. His wife said it looked so much like her husband that it scared her. On the forehead sat the two locks of hair that parted like red devil horns. The subtlest hint of a smile lurked behind an otherwise expressionless face.

  George Bernard Shaw with Rodin and his bust of Shaw, 1906.

  Years later Shaw said that the dictionary would one day define him with the entry, “Shaw, Bernard: subject of a bust by Rodin: otherwise unknown.”

  CHAPTER

  10

  BY 1905, RODIN’S STUDIO IN PARIS WAS STARTING TO LOOK more like a brothel than a workshop. While many poorer artists had to content themselves with using their wives as models, Rodin could now afford to hire women to pose for him at all times, whether he had use for them or not. At any given time a model might be stretched out on a pedestal, while another undressed behind a screen. Others just traipsed around looking bored.

  Rodin never knew when one was going to make an interesting movement, so he left out wine and food and let them wander freely. If one caught his eye he would watch, casually turning a chisel over in his hand. Then: Halt! he might suddenly shout as he groped for a tool, never taking his eyes off the model. Don’t move.

  He typically preferred this spontaneity to stiff, mannered postures. But sometimes an idea would strike and he’d suggest a pose, manipulating the model’s body like clay. They had become such objects to Rodin that once when he heard that one of his favorites had to have her appendix removed he erupted with rage for the doctor who had made “mince-meat” out of her. “They’ve opened up that young body which they ought to be worshipping, to take out a bit of gut,” he complained. He often compared his models to animals, once describing a Japanese woman who hadn’t “an ounce of fat” as a fox terrier, while he thought English women had legs like horses. He liked models in all shapes and sizes, including pregnant ones.

  Rodin stayed up late into the night sketching figures by candlelight. Sometimes his neighbors in the building would see him pacing the dark halls in his smock and carrying two candlesticks, like a wizard. In a few short years he managed to produce several hundred drawings of women’s bodies, often with their legs spread, in extreme close-up. Sometimes he showed them touching each other or masturbating. To some, this graphic body of work registered as plain perversity. When W. B. Yeats visited with his lover Maud Gonne and the poet Ella Young, the women refused to enter Rodin’s drawing room. After the artist insisted that these were his greatest works, Yeats went in out of respect, but was unable to convince Gonne and Young to join him. “He is mad, brutally and sensually mad,” Young said.

  But Rodin was hardly the only European thinker venturing deeper into the realm of sexuality at the time. In Freud’s book from that year, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the psychoanalyst argued that sexuality motivated all human behavior, and that it developed from infancy either normally or abnormally depending on the conditions of one’s life. It had been six years since Freud introduced his principles of the unconscious in The Interpretation of Dreams; now he identified sex as the primary driver of unconscious desires, frustrations, and pleasures.
To Rodin, as well as to many Viennese artists like Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele, representing these innermost aspects of the human psyche was an irresistible challenge.

  While it was unfair for critics to call Rodin’s style during this period purely pornographic, it is equally inaccurate to claim that he was innocent of that temptation. “Of course I’m a sensual human being,” Rodin told Georg Simmel during the sociologist’s study of him that spring. His senses were routinely aroused by his models, but this was “not the sensuality of sex.” Rodin preferred to depict both men and women in the nude, but said he was more drawn to women because they “understand me better than men. They are more attentive. Men listen too much to their friends.”

  But it wasn’t womens’ ears he was groping and praising. As word got out about the indecent state of affairs in Rodin’s studio, rumors began to circulate that he was going mad from “erotomania.” “The whole of Paris was talking about the not very savory details of his erotic adventures,” said Simmel. He acquired the nickname “Sultan of Meudon.”

  Some women refused to pose for the notoriously carnal artist; others did so only apprehensively. “Nothing is so amusing as a model on her first visit,” Rodin once said. “She takes off her clothes in fear and trembling, as if she had caught some infection of modesty from her other studios. Is my reputation as bad as all that?” he wondered to an assistant.

  It was, and sometimes rightly so. Rodin’s gaze alone felt predatory to some. When a woman’s physical attributes captured his interest, he stared with an attentiveness that bordered on aggressive. Anyone could fall prey to his wolfish stare—the daughters of art dealers or the wives of patrons. The effect was heightened for models who had to endure posing for his contour sketches, a method in which he drew his subject without ever glancing down at the paper or lifting pencil from the pad. It was not so much about seeing the model’s curves as it was about feeling them in his fingertips—a visual caress that apparently struck some models as unnervingly palpable.

  Aside from the symbolic threat of Rodin’s phallic pen, the artist also crossed real boundaries with his models. The young American dancer Ruth St. Denis once stood stiffly nude in Rodin’s studio while he knelt before her and kissed her arms from elbow to wrist. It wasn’t until a journalist walked in that Rodin released St. Denis, who tore off in fright.

  Some forgave Rodin’s behavior as an artistic eccentricity; still others were seduced by it. There was always a young woman waiting in the next room for him to finish working, noticed Alma Mahler, wife of Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, who once sat for a bust. She recalled in her memoirs how “some girl or other with scarlet lips invariably spent long and unrewarded hours there, for he took very little notice of her and did not speak to her even during the rests. His fascination must have been powerful to induce these girls—and they were girls in what is called ‘society’—to put up, unabashed, with such treatment.”

  One such lingerer was the young Welsh art student Gwen John, who became Rodin’s steady cinq-à-sept mistress, or the woman one sleeps with before returning home after the workday. This lasted for several years before John developed a paralyzing obsession with the artist and he had to break it off with her.

  Rodin’s appeal to young women may have been similar to that which initially attracted Rilke. Many saw him as a Pygmalion figure whose great hands could mold and reshape them. This was how Isadora Duncan described her attraction to Rodin when she was dancing in Paris in her twenties. Tired of the mannered, self-conscious feel of ballet, Duncan developed a style all her own. She had started choreographing performances that incorporated spontaneous, natural movements, which to her meant dancing with the entire body, from the head to the heels. She often performed barefoot. “The details hardly mattered to her,” her friend Jean Cocteau said. “She wanted to live massively, beyond beauty and ugliness, to seize hold of life and live it face to face, eye to eye. She belonged to the school of Rodin.”

  Isadora Duncan.

  Like Rodin, Duncan, too, looked to the art of ancient Greece for inspiration, copying the kneeling poses of women in Tanagra figurines, their loose tunic dresses, and the silhouettes of Greek vases. When they met in person, Rodin offered her a private tour of the sculptures in his studio. She recalled the encounter years later in a particularly lustful passage of her autobiography:

  He ran his hands over them and caressed them. I remember thinking that beneath his hands the marble seemed to flow like molten lead. Finally he took a small quantity of clay and pressed it between his palms. He breathed hard as he did so. The heat streamed from him like a radiant furnace. In a few moments he had formed a woman’s breast, that palpitated beneath his fingers.

  Duncan then took Rodin back to her studio and showed him her art. Apparently Rodin was impressed with the dance.

  He gazed at me with lowered lids, his eyes blazing, and then, with the same expression that he had before his works, he came toward me. He ran his hands over my neck, breast, stroked my arms and ran his hands over my hips, my bare legs and feet. He began to knead my whole body as if it were clay, while from him emanated heat that scorched and melted me. My whole desire was to yield to him my entire being . . .

  But Duncan’s timid side got the better of her that evening. She broke free from Rodin’s grip and covered herself up, sending him away before anything more could happen.

  “What a pity!” she later wrote. “How often I have regretted this childish miscomprehension which lost to me the divine chance of giving my virginity to the Great God Pan himself, to the Mighty Rodin. Surely Art and all Life would have been richer thereby!”

  NONE OF RODIN’S AFFAIRS matched the intensity of his love for Camille Claudel, until 1904, when he met the Duchesse Claire de Choiseul. Despite her name, Choiseul was not French—a fact that French society was keen to make known—and she wasn’t by most standards a duchess, either. Born Claire Coudert, she was a wealthy New Yorker who had married a French marquis, Charles-Auguste de Choiseul, thirteen years earlier. He had lost his fortune gambling, but elevated his own title from “marquis” to “duc” in a social register one summer anyway, and his wife went along with it. The daughter of a prominent lawyer in New York and sister-in-law to the Vogue publisher Condé Nast, what mattered to the “duchesse” was a title, not money.

  Choiseul met Rodin after her husband wrote the artist wondering whether the sculptor could offer an opinion on a bust he had inherited, and probably wanted to sell. At some point, his wife and Rodin began corresponding on their own and, within a few years, she was calling herself his “little wife.” That was the first sign to many of Rodin’s friends of the long power struggle that lay ahead. To them, the “duchesse” was the worst imaginable caricature of an American. She reeked of chartreuse and brandy. She howled at her own practical jokes. She covered stale makeup with more makeup, and dyed her hair with a henna that matched her lipstick. Worst of all, she knew nothing about art.

  But Choiseul, twenty-four years younger than Rodin, enlivened the artist, who was by then sixty-four. He did not care whether Choiseul had poor manners—many had thought the same about Claudel—he had he never laughed so much in his life. The bust he would sculpt of Choiseul is one of the few faces he ever made smile.

  By most accounts she dominated Rodin completely. Finding him “very poorly dressed, gauche in his manner, disheartened and almost beaten” when she met him, she gave him a makeover. She began instructing him on what to wear, what to eat, how to style his hair. At her insistence he hired a barber to trim and perfume his beard each morning. He traded in his loose tunic for an expensively tailored suit and top hat, which looked about as natural on him as a walrus wearing a turtleneck.

  Choiseul saw herself as Rodin’s ambassador to the modern world. When a New York Times reporter asked her whether it was true that Rodin was really spending so much time with an American, she responded, “Yes, I am proud to be both—the muse of the greatest sculptor in the world and a daughter of the greatest country in
the world . . .”

  Rodin with the Duchesse de Choiseul in his studio.

  Choiseul was hardly content to be merely Rodin’s muse, however. She intended to be his dealer, his accountant, his wife and, ultimately, executor of his estate. She soon tightened the open-door policy of his studio, requiring that friends now get passes from the concierge before entering. Sometimes she refused them admittance altogether. When the aspiring sculptor and heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, whose grandfather owned an apartment down the block (rented out at the time to Edith Wharton), came to study with Rodin, she was shocked to find the duchesse turning away his guests. “No use disturbing him since I am here. I handle everything. I am Rodin!” Choiseul reportedly said. Her tyrannical gatekeeping led one journalist to nickname her the Cerberus of Rodin’s studio. Others called her “The Influenza.”

  BACK IN MEUDON, Rilke was oblivious to the tawdry rumors spreading about Rodin in Paris. The poet had been too consumed with the artist’s correspondence and the visits with Shaw to spend much time in Paris at all.

  On April 23, two days after George Bernard Shaw had returned to London, Rilke was working on Rodin’s mail when an unexpected letter arrived in the post. It was from William Rothenstein, one of Rodin’s biggest patrons in London. Rothenstein had recently come to Paris as a favor to his friend Roger Fry, the newly appointed paintings curator at the Metropolitan Museum, to lend his opinion about some works he was considering buying. While he was there, Rothenstein also visited Rodin, who introduced him to Rilke.