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Camille Claudel: ‘Du rêve que fut ma vie, ceci est le cauchemar’

Susannah Wilson

in Voices from the Asylum: Four French Women Writers, 1850-1920

This chapter considers the case of the sculptor Camille Claudel, Rodin's most famous lover who, despite her enormous talent, was committed to an asylum in 1913 where she would die 30 years later. ... More

This chapter considers the case of the sculptor Camille Claudel, Rodin's most famous lover who, despite her enormous talent, was committed to an asylum in 1913 where she would die 30 years later. This analysis considers two pieces of Claudel's correspondence from 1909 and 1917–18, respectively. The first letter from Camille to her brother (the French poet Paul Claudel), written before her committal to the asylum, is strongly themed along the lines of her feelings of persecution by Rodin. The second letter from Claudel to Docteur Michaux, the doctor who wrote her ‘certificat d'internement’, gives a detailed and compelling account of the reality of her artistically unproductive and pitiful life in the asylum, and appears—superficially, at least—as an attempt at a more plausibly ‘sane’ request for clemency on the part of the medical establishment. The chapter argues that Claudel's delusions of persecution are a metaphorical representation of the genuine suffering and injustice that she endured in a society antagonistic to the potential achievements of women artists.Less

4. The Just War Tradition

David Fisher

in Morality and War: Can War Be Just in the Twenty-first Century?

This chapter traces the historical origins of the just‐war tradition from Augustine/Aquinas and explains and justifies the just‐war principles governing conduct before, during, and after war. It ... More

This chapter traces the historical origins of the just‐war tradition from Augustine/Aquinas and explains and justifies the just‐war principles governing conduct before, during, and after war. It defends just‐war thinking from recent critics, including David Rodin. It argues that the principle of proportion rightly insists on the importance of attending to consequences. The principle is, however, applied at different levels by different players—political, strategic, theatre, and tactical. The principles were historically justified on the basis of a theory of war as punishment. But such punishment would be unjust, with aggressors escaping and ordinary soldiers being punished. More promising is Grotius' justification on analogy with the right of self‐defence. But how is that right justified? The basis for the just‐war principles needs to be sought—as with other moral principles—from the contribution that they make to human welfare and the prevention of suffering.Less

Carving Cameras on Thorvaldsen and Rodin: Mid-Twentieth-Century Documentaries on Sculpture

Steven Jacobs

in Screening Statues: Sculpture and Cinema

The earliest examples of “art films,” which date from the first two decades of the twentieth century, had monuments and public sculptures as their subject. While often being actualities showing ... More

The earliest examples of “art films,” which date from the first two decades of the twentieth century, had monuments and public sculptures as their subject. While often being actualities showing inaugurations of public statues, many of these films focus on the social event of the ceremony rather than the sculptures themselves, but some films did give attention to the plastic qualities of the sculptures in natural light.3 While a cinematic reproduction of a painting seemed useless or redundant, the medium of film was considered perfect for visualizing threedimensional artworks, which necessitate a moving approach to grasp their different angles and spatial dimension. Likewise, German art film pioneer Hans Cürlis, who founded the Institut für Kulturforschung in 1919 in order to develop and propagate film as a mediator for art, considered paintings highly “unfilmic.”4 Throughout the 1920s, Cürlis made several films that consist of static shots of sculptures rotating on their axis, grouped under titles such as “Heads,” “Negro Sculpture,” “Old-German Madonnas,” “German Saints,” “Kleinplastik,” “Indian Crafts,” or “East-Asian Crafts.” Other landmark art documentaries produced before the Second World War also focused on sculpture.Less

Sculpture Ungrounded

Sebastian Zeidler

in Form as Revolt: Carl Einstein and the Ground of Modern Art

This chapter examines how the groundlessness of language is converted into a tool for describing the groundlessness of art by focusing on Negro Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein's text on visual art. ... More

This chapter examines how the groundlessness of language is converted into a tool for describing the groundlessness of art by focusing on Negro Sculpture (1915), Carl Einstein's text on visual art. It argues that Negro Sculpture was not a primitivist manifesto in any of the shopworn modernist senses; it was rather the result of a unique encounter between a lost wanderer and a set of uprooted objects. Far from abandoning the groundlessness of literature for the origin of art, Einstein instead discovered the former in the latter. This chapter suggests that groundlessness mattered in Negro Sculpture as both method and phenomenology and that Einstein's African sculpture ungrounded itself from the context into which it had been abducted. It also reads Einstein's Negro Sculpture in relation to Adolf von Hildebrand's relief and the freestanding sculpture of Georg Simmel's Auguste Rodin.Less

Saturated Forms: Rilke’s and Rodin’s Sculpture of Environment

Margareta Ingrid Christian

in Objects in Air: Artworks and Their Outside around 1900

This chapter, focusing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings on Rodin and his poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, examines how Rilke harnesses an idea of environment for art objects and how this idea is ... More

This chapter, focusing on Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings on Rodin and his poem Archaic Torso of Apollo, examines how Rilke harnesses an idea of environment for art objects and how this idea is situated at the threshold of aesthetic and biological theories of milieu. Rilke, who studied art history and registered for lectures on Darwin’s theory of evolution, reconfigures the artwork’s dependence on its milieu into the artwork’s vitalist creation of its own surroundings, namely, into sculpture’s spatial radiance, its atmosphere. Rilke’s aesthetic environment resonates not only with Uexküll’s later concept of Umwelt, it also preempts two major currents of German aesthetic thought in the twentieth century: it articulates the dynamics of the aura and it resonates with Heidegger’s later insistence that the artwork opens up a world even as it remains within itself. In contradistinction to an art-historical tradition that insists on the incompatibility between a form’s autonomy and its spatial immersion, as in Riegl and Worringer, Rilke presents the space around an artwork as the measure of its self-enclosure. The chapter also shows how Rilke extends sculptures’ spaciomaterial self-transcendence into a spaciotemporal one and it presents a notion of aesthetic metabolism that subtends Rilke’s theory of art.Less

Beethoven’s Farewell: THe Creative Genius “in the Claws of the Secession”

Emmelyn Butterfield-Rosen

in Modern Art and the Remaking of Human Disposition

Chapter 2 analyzes the disruption around 1900 of a long tradition of representing genius through postures of contemplation, taking as its point of departure the 1902 Klinger-Beethoven exhibition held ... More

Chapter 2 analyzes the disruption around 1900 of a long tradition of representing genius through postures of contemplation, taking as its point of departure the 1902 Klinger-Beethoven exhibition held by the Vienna Secession. It probes formal and conceptual discrepancies between the exhibition’s central object, Max Klinger’s Beethoven-Denkmal (1885-1902), and Gustav Klimt’s Beethovenfries, created to adorn the space that housed it. While Klinger celebrated Beethoven’s creativity by relying on long-standing corporeal conventions for expressing inner activities of intellect––a clenched hand, heavy head, and seated posture––Klimt upended associations between contemplative intellect and corporeal weight and tension. The Beethovenfries’s disregard for laws of gravity, and visual stress on bodily weightlessness and buoyancy, culminates in a decorative passage where, to express the triumphant mental state evoked by Klinger’s monument, Klimt deploys what the chapter calls the “motif of the levitating head.” Analyzing this motif in the context of Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of “the spirit of gravity,” and alongside analogous strategies in Auguste Rodin’s Balzac, Butterfield-Rosen argues that this motif concretized a period transformation in understandings of creative thought, as various disciplines––from philosophy to scientific psychology to evolutionary biology––insisted upon the role of sexuality and unconscious thinking in human mental processes.Less

Neue Gedichte

Charlie Louth

in Rilke: The Life of the Work

This chapter attends to the idea of ‘thing-poetry’, but less as a poetry about things than as poems which aspire to the condition of things. Rilke’s new material sense of poetic language, under the ... More

This chapter attends to the idea of ‘thing-poetry’, but less as a poetry about things than as poems which aspire to the condition of things. Rilke’s new material sense of poetic language, under the influence of Rodin, is given special attention, his deliberate efforts to come to terms with the specificity of language, his awareness of it as a medium that is ‘obstacle and vehicle’ (W. S. Graham) at once. Rilke’s use of the sonnet is important here, and a sign of Rilke’s new consciousness of poetic tradition. In this context there is a comparative reading of Rilke’s sonnet ‘Leda’ and Yeats’s ‘Leda and the Swan’. For the first time translation becomes an integral part of his work (Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese). This is looked at, along with the influence of Baudelaire, who shaped Rilke’s whole experience of Paris, and whose importance, though acknowledged, has still not been given the attention it deserves.Less

What’s Wrong with Rights in Ethics?

Nigel Biggar

in What's Wrong with Rights?

Chapter 6 observed the tendency of contemporary rights-talk to push all other moral considerations off the table—an observation adumbrated in Chapter 5, where contemporary defences of natural rights ... More

Chapter 6 observed the tendency of contemporary rights-talk to push all other moral considerations off the table—an observation adumbrated in Chapter 5, where contemporary defences of natural rights were seen to lack awareness that the exercise of such rights might be subject to moral obligations and even contingent upon duties of virtue. Chapter 1 observed the complaint of sceptics that natural, moral rights are often not distinguished from legal ones, with the consequence that the stability and security of the latter are smuggled into natural morality or ethics. Such smuggling is part of a cultural inclination to assimilate morality to law and replace conscience with procedures, in order to abolish the possibility of a failure of conscience. It expresses an aversion to risk and denial of tragedy, whose cost is a practical, moral rigidity that ranges from the imprudent to the absurd. This chapter displays the problem as it appears in ethics, by analysing David Rodin’s War and Self-Defense. Rodin’s attempt to justify killing in terms of a fundamental (natural) moral ‘right to life’, which can only be forfeited through culpable wrongdoing, fails. As he himself inadvertently acknowledges, that right is contingent on a range of moral factors external to the right-holder. Whether it exists at all depends on the situation as a whole and can only be determined at the end of a process of moral deliberation, not posited at the beginning as fundamental. Talk about a (natural) moral right, connoting stability and security, misleads.Less

b for Buddha

Ulrich Baer

in The Rilke Alphabet

The chapter touches on Rilke’s Books for Real Life and the overwhelming knowledge that books provide. How can one surrender themselves to someone else’s ideas while forming ideas of their own? The ... More

The chapter touches on Rilke’s Books for Real Life and the overwhelming knowledge that books provide. How can one surrender themselves to someone else’s ideas while forming ideas of their own? The chapter then moves on to create parallels between Rilke’s thinking and Buddhism.Less

t for Tower

Ulrich Baer

in The Rilke Alphabet

Rilke served as an assistant to sculptor Auguste Rodin in 1902. He learned with work ethic from the great sculptor and also tried to emulate in language what Rodin did in metal and stone.

Tragedy as Mediation: The Black Jacobins

Jeremy Matthew Glick

in Black Radical Tragic: "Performance, Aesthetics, and the Unfinished Haitian Revolution"

This chapter looks at questions of mediation in C.L.R. James’s Haitian revolutionary history The Black Jacobins. It contains a large excursus on problems of expansion and contraction and embodiment ... More

This chapter looks at questions of mediation in C.L.R. James’s Haitian revolutionary history The Black Jacobins. It contains a large excursus on problems of expansion and contraction and embodiment in Rodin’s sculpture as well as C.L.R. James’s and Rilke’s encounters with Rodin’s work, in particular St. John the Baptist. I engage the scholarship of Hazel Carby on Paul Robeson as well as David Scott’s work on C.L.R. James, including James’s encounter with Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire.Less

Ontology, Copyright, and Artistic Practice

Darren Hudson Hick

in Artistic License: The Philosophical Problems of Copyright and Appropriation

This chapter focuses on the interrelation between art ontology, artistic practice, and the law—three domains, I argue, that can truly only be separated in the abstract. While copying is an artistic ... More

This chapter focuses on the interrelation between art ontology, artistic practice, and the law—three domains, I argue, that can truly only be separated in the abstract. While copying is an artistic practice and an ontological topic, copyright is both a legal and moral one; and though the role of copying in artistic practice has evolved, many argue, copyright has failed to keep step, producing an imbalance that puts the law at odds with the domain it is meant to protect. Case studies include the copyright on Rodin’s bronzes, Biz Markie’s sampling in his song, “Alone Again,” and Cory Arcangel’s Clouds.Less

Sculpture

Shūji Tanaka

in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868-2000

This chapter discusses the history of modern Japanese sculpture from Edo to Meiji up to the postwar period. From the opening of Japan in the Meiji period, beginning in 1868, there had been ... More

This chapter discusses the history of modern Japanese sculpture from Edo to Meiji up to the postwar period. From the opening of Japan in the Meiji period, beginning in 1868, there had been substantial changes in the art of sculpture in Japan that could be attributed to influences from the West. However, fresh trends had already been developing in the Edo period. This chapter begins by taking a look at Japan’s first sculptors and their works, such as bronze monuments. It then considers naturalism in Japanese sculpture, along with Auguste Rodin’s influence on Japanese sculptors like Ogiwara Morie. It also examines the establishment of academism and the development of wood sculpture as well as various phases in Japanese sculpture between the two world wars. Finally, it assesses Japanese sculpture from the Great Kantō Earthquake to World War II and the postwar era.Less

Against legal positivism and liberal individualism

Nigel Biggar

in In Defence of War

Not every critic of the tradition of just war thinking is impelled by pacifist convictions. David Rodin is a liberal philosopher, whose searching philosophical critique finds just war thinking ... More

Not every critic of the tradition of just war thinking is impelled by pacifist convictions. David Rodin is a liberal philosopher, whose searching philosophical critique finds just war thinking incoherent, even while he withholds himself from a pacifist conclusion. At the heart of his argument is an assumed right of the individual to freedom from harm, and an individualist view of the conditions of its forfeiture. Any contemporary theory of just war that wishes to be credible must meet Rodin's objections. This Chapter Five sets out to do, arguing that Rodin seriously underestimates early Christian just war thinking from Augustine through Aquinas, Suarez and Vitoria to Grotius, that just war is not the same as defensive war, that it is fundamentally punitive and retributive, and that an individual's ‘right to life’ is not contingent solely upon his moral innocence.Less

Choice

Joe Ungemah

in Punching the Clock: Adapting to the New Future of Work

This chapter dives into why people sometime feel paralyzed by decisions. Challenging conventional wisdom that more choice is better, the chapter explains how choice can lead to cognitive overload, as ... More

This chapter dives into why people sometime feel paralyzed by decisions. Challenging conventional wisdom that more choice is better, the chapter explains how choice can lead to cognitive overload, as demonstrated first by the story of a failed electronics retailer and then by a study involving a fruit jam display at a California farmers market. Yet choice is critical to a happy and prolonged life, as shown with some novel research involving houseplants in a nursing home setting. The chapter concludes on the compounding nature of decisions, where cause and effect is never as simple as it seems, as demonstrated by the Hindenburg disaster. Implications for the workplace include providing employee choice where it matters most, promoting worker autonomy, and recognizing human biases toward oversimplifying successes and failures.Less

New Roles

Joel Lobenthal

in Alla Osipenko: Beauty and Subversion in Soviet Ballet

Liberalization of culture and politics during the Krushchev “thaw” meant a certain relaxation of potential ballet subjects and the possibility of rehabilitation for creative figures who had been ... More

Liberalization of culture and politics during the Krushchev “thaw” meant a certain relaxation of potential ballet subjects and the possibility of rehabilitation for creative figures who had been marginalized. Accusations of eroticism did not prevent Jacobson’s Rodin trio from reaching the Kirov stage in 1959, three duets inspired by Rodin sculpture. Now at the height of her renown as an avatar of the new Soviet ballet, Osipenko was appointed a delegate to the Central Committee of the Komsomol, the Communist Party youth organization.Less

A Second Gestural Revolution and Gesturing Hands in Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, Mary Wigman, and Tilly Losch

Lucia Ruprecht

in Gestural Imaginaries: Dance and Cultural Theory in the Early Twentieth Century

This chapter has two aims: to trace in more detail gestural dance’s ability to realize what Susan Leigh Foster calls “physicality as a discourse”; and to show how modernist dance reflects upon this ... More

This chapter has two aims: to trace in more detail gestural dance’s ability to realize what Susan Leigh Foster calls “physicality as a discourse”; and to show how modernist dance reflects upon this discursiveness through the pronounced and sometimes self-referential use of hands. Addressing modernist choreography as a second gestural revolution, the chapter argues that it constitutes a recovery, on its own terms, of the meaningful corporeality that was established by the first gestural revolution of the eighteenth-century ballet reform. In order to test Jacques Rancière’s modernist aesthetic of the autonomous subject on a set of examples, the chapter also explores Hilde Doepp’s 1926 book Träume und Masken (Dreams and Masks), Rainer Maria Rilke’s writings on Auguste Rodin, photographs of hands by Albert Renger-Patzsch and Charlotte Rudolph, and the queer aesthetic of Tilly Losch’s Tanz der Hände (Dance of the Hands).Less

The Modernism of The Sonnets to Orpheus: Abstraction and Figurality

Hannah Vandegrift Eldridge

in Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus: Philosophical and Critical Perspectives

Although Rilke does not fit neatly within any of the movements that made up European modernism, he nonetheless takes up the problems they identified and articulated: problems of the human relation to ... More

Although Rilke does not fit neatly within any of the movements that made up European modernism, he nonetheless takes up the problems they identified and articulated: problems of the human relation to the world; the meaning of that world and the things in it; the potential loss of meaning in the face of various modes of alienation; the roots of alienation in objectifying modes of thought or the monumental shifts occasioned by technological advances; and the confrontation with human mortality and finitude in the absence of meaning-granting institutions. This essay argues that Rilke’s engagement with the visual arts offers some his most direct statements of how aesthetic making responds to these problems prior to demonstrating that The Sonnets to Orpheus are Rilke’s poetic working-through of how both the themes and specific language-use of poetry might help salvage world relations threatened by a stance of technological mastery and reduction to use value.Less

Torture (2015)*

Henry Shue

in Fighting Hurt: Rule and Exception in Torture and War

This chapter distinguishes the current practise of torture developed through academic research funded by CIA from the irrelevant hypothetical examples often relied upon by moral philosophers, and ... More

This chapter distinguishes the current practise of torture developed through academic research funded by CIA from the irrelevant hypothetical examples often relied upon by moral philosophers, and summarizes recent arguments against torture, including the methodological critique of the ticking bomb scenario (TBS) by David Luban and a variety of substantive critiques. The latter include my own critique of torture as merciless, Luban’s critique of it as the ultimate in the tyranny condemned by liberals, Jeremy Waldron’s defence of the prohibition of torture as a legal archetype, and David Rodin’s defence of the prohibition as a moral archetype. An effective form of interrogation that is an alternative to torture is morally evaluated.Less