Corps in-visibles
An investigation into Balzac’s dressing gown
The Musée Rodin is showcasing a little-known piece from its collections, Auguste Rodin’s Study for a Dressing Gown for Balzac. Designed from a selection of sculptures from the museum’s collections, 19th-century fashion pieces from the Palais Galliera, and previously unpublished archives from the library of the Institut de France, the exhibition unfolds, starting with the singular Dressing Gown, an investigation into Rodin’s search for Balzac’s body. This investigation is a veritable prelude to a reflection on the bodies—real, idealized, statued, and hidden—in the monumental statuary of the 19th century that still populate our contemporary world.
Balzac’s body, as Rodin apprehends it through clothing, when he has a costume of the deceased novelist remade by Balzac’s tailor, reveals the man’s physique, considered unflattering by the monument’s patrons: Balzac, in a word, was fat. By bringing together couture and sculpture, and comparing the practice of tailors to that of statuary, the exhibition observes how the perception of bodies influences the creation of their highly idealized bronze image. It reveals how the myth of Balzac writing in a dressing gown ultimately allows Rodin to hide under ample folds a body rejected because of its corpulence. The exhibition invites us to reflect on the representation of bodies in public space, and on the necessary contemporary broadening of these representations.
Chosen by the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1891 to sculpt a monument to Balzac, Auguste Rodin embarked on a quest for the novelist who had been missing for nearly half a century: from studying Balzac’s image in Brussels at the home of a collector of Balzacian relics, to searching for his body in the writer’s native Touraine, where Rodin found a corpulent carter as a model, the stages of this investigation are recreated throughout the exhibition. A largely unknown fact, Rodin even found Balzac’s tailor and had him remake a costume of the writer to better understand his physiognomy. Visitors will be able to discover Balzac’s frock coat, recut for the occasion based on real and unpublished measurements of his body. Rodin then took on the challenge of embodying Balzac in clay and plaster for four years. The reaction of his contemporaries, for whom a large bronze man could not be represented as small and pot-bellied, led him to turn to the myth of a Balzac writing in a dressing gown to hide this body under the folds of a large drape. The casting of a real dressing gown in plaster, around 1896-1897, then appeared as the solution to the quest for a plastic formula restoring Balzac’s idea, in the absence of representing his exact body. The extraordinary Study of a dressing gown for Balzac, to which the second part of the exhibition is devoted, reflects the sculptor’s journey towards an idealization of the body, and invites us to question the current issues related to fatphobia and the exclusion of many bodies diverging from the “norm”.
The exhibition ends with the confrontation of the statue of Balzac, completed in 1898 and immediately rejected by the Société des Gens de Lettres, with a work by the contemporary sculptor Thomas J. Price representing an anonymous black woman, in jogging pants. On one side, an idealized Balzac but difficult to understand for his patrons, late 19th century, and on the other the monumental celebration of an anonymous woman, symbol of a new diversity in public statuary of the 21st century. By taking as a starting point the process of creating the Monument to Balzac, the exhibition “Invisible Bodies” will invite a broader reflection on the evolution of representations of the body in public space.
