In⸱visible Bodies

In autumn 2024, the Musée Rodin will showcase a little-known piece from its collections: Auguste Rodin’s Study for Balzac's Dressing Gown. Drawing on a series of sculptures from the museum’s collections, 19th-century garments from the Palais Galliera and never-before-shown archives from the Institut de France, the exhibition titled In·visible Bodies conducts an investigation into Rodin’s search for a body for Balzac, centred on his singular piece, Dressing Gown. This enquiry is a prelude to an exploration into the bodies – be they real, idealised, static or obscured – in 19th-century monumental statuary, which continue to populate our contemporary world today.

Balzac's body, as Rodin perceived it through his clothing after getting one of the late novelist's garments remade by Balzac's tailor, displays a physique considered less than flattering by those who had commissioned the monument: Balzac, in a word, was fat. Sparking a dialogue between fashion and sculpture, and drawing parallels between the practices of tailor and statue maker, the exhibition looks at how the perception of bodies shapes the production of their much-idealised bronze likeness. It reveals how much the myth of Balzac writing in his dressing gown ultimately allowed Rodin to conceal beneath wide pleats a body rejected for its corpulence. In·visible Bodies invites the public to reflect on how bodies are represented in public spaces, and on how those representations need to be expanded today.

In search of a body

Commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1891 to sculpt a monument to Balzac, Auguste Rodin embarked on a quest to get to know the novelist who had died nearly half a century earlier: from studying Balzac's image at the home of a collector of Balzacian relics in Brussels to searching for his body in the writer’s native Touraine, where he found a portly carter for a model, the exhibition retraces the steps of Rodin's investigation. It is a little-known fact that Rodin even found Balzac’s tailor and had him remake one of the writer’s redingotes in order to better understand his corporal physiognomy. Visitors will have the chance to see the garment, made to the actual measurements of his body.

A body concealed

Rodin then took on the challenge of representing Balzac in clay and plaster over four years. The reaction of his contemporaries – for whom a great man of bronze ought not to be represented as short and plump – prompted him to look to the image of Balzac writing in his dressing gown and hide his body beneath the pleats of a large robe. A plaster cast of an actual dressing gown, made around 1896-97, was Rodin's solution to the search for a visual aid that could reconstitute the idea of Balzac, for want of an exact representation of his body. The extraordinary Study for Balzac's Dressing Gown, which is the subject of the second part of the exhibition, presents the sculptor’s journey towards an idealisation of the body and provokes questions about the current challenges concerning fatphobia and the marginalisation of bodies that deviate from the “norm”.

Bodies that matter

The exhibition ends by juxtaposing the statue of Balzac, completed in 1898 and immediately rejected by the Société des Gens de Lettres, with a work by contemporary sculptor Thomas J. Price depicting an anonymous Black woman in a tracksuit. On the one hand, a Balzac idealised yet hard to grasp by those who commissioned it in the late 19th century; on the other, the monumental celebration of an anonymous woman, the symbol of a new kind of diversity in 21st-century public statuary. Taking as its starting point the process of the creation of the Monument to Balzac, In·visible Bodies will spark a broader reflection on the changing representations of the body in public spaces.