The Phantom Lady Strikes Again
The Phantom Lady looks again
at Rodin’s Gates of Hell .
REVISITING RODIN'S 'GATES OF HELL'
Rodin’s Gates of Hell is one of those great
works of Western art that one studies in art school and soon relegates to some long
past art historical moment. Recently when I was stranded in the Rodin Sculpture
Garden in Stanford University waiting for a friend to pick me up, I spent a
long time in front of the Gates, leisurely
‘re-looking’ and thinking around it. Stanford University has the second largest
collection of Rodin’s works after Paris, spread over several floors of the
Canter Center Museum. The sculpture garden on the side houses his monumental
bronze doors depicting a scene from The Inferno,
the first section of Dante’s Divine
Comedy, which is popularly known
as the Gates of Hell. The Directorate
of Fine Arts in Paris which originally commissioned the sculpture in 1880 to be
an ‘inviting’ entrance to a Decorative
Arts Museum, apparently left the choice of the subject to Rodin. Whether the
subject of Hell was suitable for a Decorative Arts Museum or not, Rodin, who
was fascinated by Dante all his life, had begun making sketches of characters from
the Inferno even before he got the
commission and continued to work on it until his death in 1917. The Decorative
Arts Museum was never built.
This was the first time I
was seeing the Gates in the ‘flesh’
so to speak and I thought they were indeed extremely ‘fleshy’. Over a hundred
and eighty agitated figures pop out of the matrix of the relief from the twenty
foot high doors. The ground could be a
landscape with rocks or even the surface of skin with wounds and lacerations.
The work has an overall sense of great instability and movement with figures of
men and women tumbling upside down, falling, in a tangle of bodies. But there
are no traditional scenes of sinners being tortured here. Rodin has not used
any of the bestial imagery from Dante’s Inferno,
with its nine circles of hell and its fabulous beasts, its wasps and maggots,
or its swamps, blood and fire. Instead, one feels a sense of helplessness in
the bodies to resist the gravitational pull downwards, a lack of uprightness,
an inability to stand erect. He builds up a ‘feeling’ of horror without
horrific acts being narrated. Perhaps Rodin as the first great modern sculptor,
a child of the rational thought and scientific temper of the modern age, saw Hell
as the opposite of rational order, as absolute chaos. He places above the
scenes of swirling disorder the iconic sculpture of The Thinker, representing Rodin himself, looking down at the suffering
below him, deep in existential thought.
My mind wanders off into
more art history, to the grand tradition of Christian painting and the fantastical
paintings of Heaven and Hell by Hieronymous Bosch and Brueghel and the Northern
painters, Michelangelo’s Last Judgement,
and William Blake. Biblical themes have been central to Western art. I once
argued hotly with a European curator when she accused Indian artists of doing
religious themes, that our references to religion were not traditional or
devotional, but critical social comments responding to the political crisis in
the country. Many contemporary western artists like Damien Hirst used Biblical
themes in a direct way for instance (the fish imagery, the golden calf?) but
were not seen as religious artists. Hirst’s dead and rotting animals and armies
of flies were direct descendants of the kind of imagery used in traditional
European scenes of hell.
One birthday historian Ramchandra
Guha gave me a book on Marguerite Milward, a British sculptor trained in Paris
under Antoine Bourdelle, who comes to India on a project to do anthropological
portraits (a kind of ‘peoples of India’ project) in the heyday of those
expeditions. In a fascinating story, Milward first comes to India in 1926 and
stays in Santiniketan as a guest of Rabindranath Tagore, who suggests that she
come back to teach the students sculpture. When she comes back on his
invitation in 1929, one of the students she teaches is Ramkinker Baij. Bourdelle,
the influential French sculptor and teacher had assisted Rodin for many years. Ramkinker
who is seen as India’s first modernist sculptor, adopts Rodin’s style of rough
impressionist modelling via Bourdelle and Milward which comes to be seen as a ‘virile’
modern style. So we have an interesting situation here where Marguerite Milward,
as a rare woman sculptor and teacher, introduces a ‘virile’ way of modelling sculpture
to the Indian art scene! (My Malayali leftist friends in art school in the ‘80s
taunted me for using rounded forms in my sculptures and called it ‘feudal’. The
ideal was K P Krishnakumar, who was strongly influenced by Ramkinker when in
Santiniketan and whose figures were heroic and angst-ridden, bent in tortured
poses, struggling against hellish forces. Krishnakumar and his friends later
formed the Indian Radical Sculptors and Painters Assocation, wanting to create again
the idea a modernist avant-garde.)
Then as an artist I think
how complicated the casting must have been. The ambition of Rodin’s twenty foot
high Gates has no precedent though he
took inspiration from Lorenzo Ghiberti’s 15th century bronze Gates of Paradise at the Baptistry of
St. John in Florence. Rodin’s Gates
however is no harmonious classical piece. He entirely does away with the
Rennaissance perspectives and architectural details of Ghiberti’s Gates, or even of earlier illustrations
of the Inferno, instead placing his
figures in a kind of no man’s land, using the structure of the doors as an
armature. The figures and forms forcefully jump out of the ground in extreme
three-dimensionality, and several like the Thinker
must have been cast separately and then welded on. The technical virtuosity of Gates makes it a landmark.
Just as the vamp is always
more seductive than the heroine, artists love scenes of hell and turbulence. While
Heaven has to be orderly and harmonious, Hell could be interpreted in many interesting
ways. Hell provides more space for imagination and invention than goody goody
scenes. Indian contemporary popular charts of scenes of Hell influenced by medieval
Christian ideas and taking from the imagery of English popular prints, show sinners
being tortured by devils according to their sins: stealing, adultery, lying, murder,
the devils in the prints amazingly resembling those in Mughal painting, with a
further ancestry in Persian miniatures.
Once, when I was working
with the cinema hoarding painter Ealamalai in Bangalore, he told me he had
designed an ashram for a Hindu Swamiji on the outskirts of the city. He said that
to get to the swami in the ashram on top of the hill which was Heaven, you had
to climb past a series of caves built in cement, with painted sculptures depicting
graphic scenes of Hell where sinners are being punished cruelly for their
various misdeeds. The scenes were taken straight from popular charts, very
Christian in their ideas, but fully nativized in the popular Hindu imagination.
The Phantom Lady
1 May 2015
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