February Art: hell
The doors of Hell and Chancery are always open, they say. But Rodin’s Gates of Hell (1880-1917) don’t open – well, physically they can’t. But they do open the future of sculpture: his, and everybody’s. Because everybody conceivable is here somewhere, lamenting tumbling thinking peering falling flirting kneeling declining loving running reclining coupling supporting berating despairing.
Originally a commission, they were planned as a dark mirror to Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise at the St John Baptistry in Florence. When the project didn’t come off, Rodin kept the huge clay model with him, sporadically adding and altering the figures which surround and plague a brooding Dante (also recognisable as Rodin’s sit-alone sculpture The Thinker).
In this way these doors are Rodin’s Ur-source, origin text, the spawning-ground or resource for most of his other sculptures, becoming in the process impassable, impossible – confusingly they also exist in several places and versions cast in bronze or plaster. L’enfer, c’est les autres, said Sartre, meaning in part how others see us; wherever and however we look at these gates, hell is us.
thebicyclops 