The Hand of Man as Expressive Image

A plaster cast of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Hand of God,” modeled between 1894 and 1898, is the centerpiece of a small but engaging traveling exhibition called “The Hands of Rodin: A Tribute to B. Gerald Cantor,” which is currently having its debut at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Made from one of four versions of the sculpture that were carved in marble, it’s a very peculiar object.

A sleekly carved hand is shown rising up from the blocky, chiseled mass of stone. Entwined within its graceful fingers are two partially formed figures--one male, one female--who seem in the process of being born, full-blown. The naked couple, locked in a coital embrace, subtly anticipates future birth and renewal, suggesting an unbroken chain of life in which art and nature have seamlessly merged.

In form and concept, the sculpture makes a forceful nod in the direction of Michelangelo, the Renaissance master Rodin so fervently admired. The Italian’s famous carvings of slaves showed sensuously unfinished figures in a tormented struggle, vainly trying to free themselves from both the surrounding blocks of stone and the constricting bondage of their human condition. Likewise, the figures in “The Hand of God” wrestle with big questions of mortality.

Michelangelo--known in his day as “The Divine,” thanks to the union of his talent and his insistence on considering the artist as a creator--was as much the god being revered in the title of Rodin’s “The Hand of God” as any spiritual being. So, by implication, was Rodin himself--the “hand” that had carved the heavenly sculpture. He was an artist of audacious ambition, one who was committed to the proliferation of his work.

Odds are, there would have been no Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), seminal Modern sculptor, had there been no great, late-19th century project to transform Paris from a ramshackle medieval village into a glittering city of plazas, parks and grand boulevards, on which an elaborate urban promenade could be conducted. For as Paris rapidly metamorphosed into a tumultuous public stage, one that was appropriate to a newly emergent class of aspiring bourgeois citizens, art in general--and sculpture in particular--began to assume a new demeanor.

An age of public monuments was ushered in, and Rodin’s sculpture arose to meet the unprecedented occasion.

His wasn’t quite the sculpture people probably had in mind. Portraying St. John the Baptist as a forcefully striding nude--a vital man of action--inevitably causes a double-take.

Rodin’s work, despite its knowledgeable allusions to formidable artistic traditions from classical antiquity to Michelangelo, was finally unlike anything that had come before. Its reception by critics and the public was almost always sharply divided.

Rodin pioneered the use of the bodily fragment--a torso without arms, a hand with fingers clenched, a head balanced atop a billowing cloak--in which a smaller part of a figure stood in for the whole. Incomplete figures were an evocative metaphor, giving shape to the new fragmentation in modern experience.

Even more important, Rodin used his extraordinary skills as a modeler in clay to render figures whose bodies seem to be in perpetual flux. There is remarkable instability to the forms in his most powerful work, forms whose bumps and hollows create a shifting play of light that further fractures what would otherwise be a static impression of wholeness.

By extension, his figures’ psyches also seem dynamic--caught in turbulent changes. That’s one reason the great bronze cliche, Rodin’s “Thinker,” seems somehow sentient.

Still, if Rodin’s startling sculptural forms and intricate artistic attitudes were unexpected, his often monumental work gave a nonetheless heroic image to a public that intuitively came to recognize its own hazy, unformed aspirations within it. His sculpture--sometimes laughed at, sometimes reviled for its libidinous candor, eventually adored--made him prototypal of the popular image of a Modern artist, an image that is still very much with us today.

The exhibition at LACMA is a frankly sentimental tribute to the late B. Gerald Cantor, who died in July. Cantor collected more than 700 of Rodin’s sculptures over some 50 years, and he donated many of them to universities and museums, including LACMA. (The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation organized the show, which will travel to Philadelphia, Brooklyn and three other cities.) In addition to the plaster cast of “The Hand of God”--the marble sculpture that initiated Cantor’s interest in Rodin--the presentation includes 26 small sculptures of individual hands, most just a few inches in size, as well as 22 larger Rodin bronzes.

The show focuses on Rodin’s use of the human hand as an expressive image. It makes the convincing (if perhaps somewhat obvious) case that, next to the face, the hand is the most expressive part of the human anatomy, and that Rodin deftly exploited its possibilities.

To know exactly how, you have to dream a bit--especially when looking at the long wall-case in which the 26 little sculptures of hands are displayed. They do represent a wide variety of hand positions, with all their variety of expressiveness. But when Rodin made them, he intended for viewers to actually hold the little sculptures in their own hands, to turn them over in their fingers and press flesh against bronze.

Unfortunately, you can’t do that in a museum.

There is also a gentle irony within the show, dedicated as it is to a consideration of the artist’s definitive hand in creating sculpture. Rodin wanted his work to be widely available. During his lifetime, he closely supervised production of large editions of both his bronzes and his marbles. (At his death in 1917 at age 77, for example, more than 300 bronze copies of “The Kiss” had been made.) In his will, he also authorized the administrators of Paris’ Rodin Museum to initiate new editions from the vast stock of plaster models he had made.

More than half the larger bronzes in the LACMA show are posthumous casts, made as early as 1923 and as recently as 1983. Rodin never saw them. Just how different two casts of the same sculpture can be is in evidence in two exhibited versions of a sculpture of a wizened nude, “She Who Was the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife,” modeled around 1889-90.

The dates of the two castings are unknown. One sculpture is smooth and visually molten, its blackish patina adding a funereal overtone to the form of an aging body gone slack. The other is sharper, more resilient, its folds of wrinkled flesh more crisp and the patina a warmer tone with golden bronze highlights. They’re two very different works of art.

Which would Rodin have approved of? Or would he have embraced both--or neither?

It’s hard to say. Whatever the answer, the conundrum speaks of the growing tensions between “the artist’s hand” and mechanical reproduction in an Industrial Age, tensions that began to come to a boil in the late-19th century. Those dynamic stresses and strains reflect the fragmentation and instability of a radically changing world--to which Rodin so miraculously gave form in his art.

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“THE HANDS OF RODIN: A TRIBUTE TO B. GERALD CANTOR,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd. Dates: Tuesdays through Thursdays, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; Fridays, 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Ends March 2. Prices: adults $6, students/seniors $4, children $1. Phone: (213) 857-6000.