By happy circumstance rather than clever planning I’m posting this 80th essay in the same month as my 80th birthday. Which puts me in mind of reflections in Europe last year on aging and the passage of time.
I had never thought much about the art of sculpture until becoming mesmerized by a striking statue in Hanoi a decade ago. Now I’m interested so, strolling through Paris last year, I went through the imposing arched gate opening onto the spacious gardens surrounding the 18th Century Hôtel Biron, which was home and studio to the sculptor Auguste Rodin and is now a museum devoted to his life and work.
Rodin is best known today for sculpting athletic physiques like “The Thinker” and sensuous figures like “The Kiss” but for some reason I was drawn to his portrayals old age, as well those on the same theme by his student and mistress, Camille Claudel.
The Helmet Maker
In the late 1880s Rodin produced a pensive figure of an elderly woman called “Celle qui fut la belle heaulmière” (She Who Was the Beautiful Helmet Maker) which, for some reason, is translated in English as “She Who Was the Helmet Maker’s Once-Beautiful Wife”.
Rodin had based the work on a poem by François Villon (1431–1463) called “Les Regrets de la Belle Heaulmière” (Regrets of the Beautiful Helmet Maker) who reflects on her long-lost love:
Now he’s dead, these thirty years:
And I live on, old, and grey.
When I think of those times, with tears,
What I was, what I am today,
View myself naked: turn at bay,
Seeing what I am no longer,
Poor, dry, meagre, worn away,
I almost forget myself in anger.
Although I didn’t have adequate words to express my impressions at the time, I recently discovered a paragraph by the writer Robert A. Heinlein who does a pretty good job.
Anybody can look at a pretty girl and see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl that she used to be. But a great artist – a master – and that is what Auguste Rodin was – can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is…and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be…and see that this lovely young girl is still alive, not old and ugly at all, but simply prisoned inside her ruined body.
Of course such regrets are not confined to women. The poet W.B. Yeats expressed much the same emotion.
There’s not a woman turns her face
Upon a broken tree,
And yet the beauties that I loved
Are in my memory;
I spit into the face of Time
That has transfigured me.
Camille Claudel
One room in the museum is devoted to the work of Camille Claudel, Rodin’s mistress and talented artist in her own right. She, too, produced figures on themes of aging. Some time after Rodin made the “Helmet Maker”, she produced a sculpture called “L’Âge mûr” (The Age of Maturity). Some say it’s an allegory of an aging man leaving his youth behind and being drawn towards old age and death, but there’s more to it than that – it’s autobiographical. And hers is a sad story.
Claudel and Rodin met in 1883 when she became his student, model, muse and lover – she was 19, he was 43. Rodin refused to cut ties with the common-law wife who had borne his son; Claudel had an abortion in 1892 at age 28; she began work on L’Âge mûr in 1894; and in 1898 ended the relationship. When Rodin saw the sculpture he was angry and shocked. No doubt he saw it, as others have since, as representing him being drawn away by age (or an older woman), leaving a devastated, pleading young Claudel behind. Sadly, she later had a breakdown and her mother and brother had her confined to a mental institution where she spent the next 30 years until her death, despite there being no evidence that she was actually insane.
Other Artworks
A couple of days after learning all about Rodin and Claudel I explored the lofty Panthéon where many French luminaries are buried and a duplicate of Foucault’s Pendulum still swings. On one wall is a large painting by Jean-Paul Laurens depicting the death of Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris.
It’s notable for depicting the saint as an elderly woman, almost blind, in the process of giving a final blessing, rather than the usual idealized and other-worldly portrayals of a heroic younger woman. To me at least, it was another example of of evoking a young woman now living inside an aging body. I have to admit that now I’m getting up there myself, I think of myself in much the same way – a reasonably well-maintained classic machine with a young driver inside.
Passing through Madrid on my way home I spent some time at the modernistic Reina Sofia museum of modern art, among other things watching the 1930 avant garde surrealist comedy “L’Age d’Or” directed by the Spaniard Luis Buñuel. He was an interesting character so I’m content to give him the last artistic word on aging – “it doesn’t matter unless you are a cheese.”
I’m inclined agree with actress Sophia Loren who was still working and looking good at 90 and said that “there is a fountain of youth: it’s in your mind!” Although I guess it does help to be rich and famous..
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All pictures are mine except the photograph of Camille Claudel at age 20 which is in the public domain from Wikimedia Commons.
