Passionate Pioneer

Two bearded Frenchmen, Paul Cezanne and Auguste Rodin, swung wide the gates of modern art. What Cezanne's deep, crusty researches into the shapes of landscape did for modem painting, Rodin's passionate punching, kneading, twisting, squeezing and stretching of the human figure did for modern sculpture. Last week a Manhattan gallery honored the pioneer sculptor with a show of small works by him and 27 moderns, "The Heritage of Auguste Rodin."

Nineteenth Century sculpture was more lifelike than lively, consisting mostly of well-proportioned heroes and heroines correctly modeled in conventional poses. Young Rodin easily licked his contemporaries at that game. His male nude Age of Bronze caused a scandal at the "Paris Salon of 1877" because the judges mistakenly supposed it must have been cast from life. No one could make the same mistake about his later, greater bronzes. Dented everywhere by Rodin's thick thumbs, they were expressions of life, rather than copies. His marbles, when made by professional stone carvers from Rodin's clay models, were comparatively chill. His line and wash drawings were among his most spontaneous and therefore best creations.

When Rodin died in 1917, he had made spontaneity the rule instead of the exception in sculpture. A few of his followers, among them Aristide Maillol, Wilhelm Lehmbruck and Jacques Lipchitz, combined it as he had with a thorough knowledge of the body and the classical tradition. The greater number used it as a substitute for knowledge. Many of those in last week's show were like men who, having never learned to sing, just shout. There were others who seemed not to belong in the exhibition at all. The doughnut-soft abstractions of Jean Arp, the polished simplifications of Constantin Brancusi, the striding stick-figures of Alberto Giacometti and Henry Moore's pierced fantasies would probably have baffled Rodin as much as they do most gallerygoers.

For, like Cezanne, Rodin kept a firm hold on classical art. "I have invented nothing," he wrote. "I look at things from a symbolic point of view, but it is Nature that gives me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks, but I try to put myself in the state of mind of the men who have left us the statues of antiquity."

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