Research Seminar Series

October 24, 2007 - 2:00
G19, Old Mining Building

Dr. Claudine Mitchell

Cruel Garden:Semantics and Technique in Rodin’s drawings

At the turn of the century the sculptor Rodin embraced drawing as his primary creative medium. The cultural industry of the later twentieth century has divulged a small fragment of his vast production only to promote a notion of erotic art largely disconnected from the cultural milieu and the artistic preoccupations that presided over their creation. This paper focuses on the drawings Rodin produced for the illustrated edition of Octave Mirbeau’s novel, Le Jardin des supplices (1902). I define Rodin’s mode of representation around the notion of the rarefying of the iconic sign. In light of literary theories expounded in the circle of poet Stéphane Mallarmé, I explain the new notion of reader-beholder that sustained the collaboration between Rodin, Mirbeau and their contemporary audience. The thematic of sexual initiation, active sexuality and torture formed part of Rodin and Mirbeau’s joint project to reconfigure the modernity of their practice in the early twentieth century.  How did the metaphor of the torture garden serve their artistic ambitions in a historical period marked by the ruptures of the Dreyfus Affair?

Dr Claudine Mitchell is Honorary Fellow in the University of Leeds’ School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, where she taught from 1980 to 2005. Her research interests focus on the relation between the visual arts, language and History. Publications include studies on the position of women: Camille Claudel (Art History, 1989), Madeleine Pelletier (Feminist Review, 1989), On the Brink? (LUP, 1992), Women Sculptors and the First World War (Ashgate, 2000), Jane Poupelet (Art History, 2002 and Gallimard 2005).  Her essay on Rodin in the circle of Mallarmé (Stanford University Press, 2005) and her most recent book, Rodin: The Zola of Sculpture (Ashgate, 2004), challenge established Rodin scholarship. She has collaborated on the exhibition of Rodin’s erotic drawings held at the Musée Rodin in Paris in 2007 and is currently collaborating on the Camille Claudel retrospective opening in Madrid in November 2007 and at the Musée Rodin in Paris in April 2008.