working on his statue of Honoré de Balzac, a scandalizing and drawn-out commission begun not long after the writer's death, the sculptor Auguste Rodin journeyed from his studio near Paris to Tours, Balzac's hometown, in search of body doubles for his subject, "sacred mirrors" in a physical sense. Rodin hoped to find models with jowly features, men who could literally flesh out a local "type", one that Balzac had depicted after his own image and also, as a novelist, sought to transcend—by reaching them, Rodin believed he would be able to conjure the man himself.
such conduits for artistic transference included a conductor named Estager, of whom Rodin made the following bust in terracotta, on view at the Met. despite having a general awareness of Rodin’s work and his Balzac project, I encountered Estager's portrait specifically for the first time in this week's sculpture class. the bust is a finely rendered piece, rounded and recessed with precision. the texturized object is the result of Rodin taking a wet-cloth to the clay surface, rubbing the skin all-over after casting it from a life-mask.
the sculpture also has an opening at the back, a hole set midway between Estager's occipital and parietal lobes, like a psychic door hollowed out for thought-form passage or an inversion of a tree's outer burl. who among us hasn't had that happen? as a study in "essence", my teacher thinks it an ideal example of what the medium can do, how sculpture can breathe with "all that is", as another teacher of mine might put it. I am inclined to think so, too.
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