Rodin and Degas — how dancers inspired the impressionist sculptors to greatness

From archaic statues of Dionysian revels to David Smith’s postwar steel abstractions inspired by choreographer Martha Graham, sculpture has always found in dance a strange alter ego. Both are concerned with the human body, and they spark off each other: sculpture, still, solid and durable, takes animation from memorialising the dynamic, ephemeral joys of dance.

So when the path-breakers of modern sculpture sought to depict the vitality of everyday life, dance was an obvious, compelling subject. This story unfolds at Bath’s Holburne Museum in a small, exciting new exhibition, Rodin — Degas: Impressionist Sculpture, installed in the lovely day-lit Georgian gallery. Its static elegance — Gainsborough’s “The Byam Family”, Zoffany’s Indian conversation piece “The Auriol and Dashwood Families” — highlights by opposition the sculptures’ vibrancy and idiosyncrasy.

At the show’s heart is a fabulous encounter: the obscure, bony teenage ballet rat training at the Paris Opera, made famous by Degas’s wax and fabric likeness, comes face to face with the most celebrated dancer of the 20th century, the innovative, agile Nijinsky, about to spring into the air, as conceived by Rodin.

In “Little Dancer Aged Fourteen”, laundress’s daughter Marie van Goethem — sturdy legs, right foot pushing forward, arms stretched behind, head held high, exaggerated low forehead, thrusting chin — is depicted as proud yet vulnerable, a working girl touched with glamour. The figure’s fierce naturalism stirred outrage — “vicious”, “repulsive” — at the Impressionist Exhibition in 1881. Especially bewildering were the human hair, linen bodice, tulle tutu, satin slippers (though the stockings were sculpted wax). Now we see a precursor to assemblage, a play on artifice and, in the flattened features which then seemed grotesque, a herald of modernist stylisation.

To Rodin, the appeal of dance was not classical ballet but the improvisations and transgressions of avant-garde troupes. Aged 72, he stood to cheer Nijinsky’s explicitly sexual movements and gestures in the Ballets Russes’s L’après–midi d’un faune at its Paris premiere in 1912. Much of the audience booed and Le Figaro the next morning condemned the dance’s “vile movements of erotic bestiality”. Nijinsky rewarded the artist’s enthusiasm with a sitting, and Rodin distilled his explosive impact and provocative, jerky awkwardness in a sculpture of tremendous coiled energy: taut curving torso, lithe limbs, feral look — as darting and jagged as the choreography.

Degas, hiding in the wings, spying in rehearsal rooms, perceived in the discipline of 19th-century ballet a metaphor for his own art — gruelling, systematic work, then the thrill of theatrical illusion. “No art was ever less spontaneous than mine,” he said. For Rodin, the equivalence between sculpture and dance was rather sensual expression, art as a force of nature. But both, as the Holburne’s juxtapositions show, have their origins in impressionist method: broken surfaces, light effects, fragmentation.

The uneven supple surfaces of Degas’s “Dancer Ready to Dance, Right Foot Forward” and “Fourth Position Front, on the Left Leg”, absorb and reflect light, reminiscent of flickering points of white in his paintings. Sickert recorded Degas with his wax dancers in his studio: “He turned the statuette [round] slowly to show me the successive silhouettes thrown on a white sheet by the light of a candle.”

Painters turn to sculpture to address formal problems. Degas used it to explore poses in the round, from every angle and compositional possibility. Some figures are caught as if off guard — “Dancer Looking at the Sole of Her Right Foot” — while others hold positions demanding extreme control. In “Grande Arabesque, Third Time”, the dancer remains steady on one foot and raises the other leg impossibly high and straight: a tense moment of perfect balance about to give way.

After the debacle of “Little Dancer”, Degas never showed a sculpture publicly. But as his eyesight worsened, he increasingly worked by touch. Experimenting with wax models of dancers and also bathers, strengthened with clay and constructed around armatures of wire, broken paintbrushes and wine corks, he continually adjusted them to develop variations and repetitions. There is a correspondence between these sculptures’ tender/rough kneaded contours and the looser manner — squiggles, dashes, sprinkled colour — of the late pastels.

Here, “Woman Getting out of the Bath” — body vigorously twisting, from the front ungainly, precarious, cropped beneath the knee, yet the long rippling back sumptuously modelled and textured, and the hair stylishly looped — particularly recalls the multiple great pastels of nudes seen from behind with one leg in the tub, “The Morning Bath” and “After the Bath”.

One senses a terrific exploratory freedom in these sculptures fashioned with no thought of exhibiting — the casts were all made after Degas’s death, and are still rarely shown. By contrast, Rodin, dreaming of being the 19th-century Michelangelo, grappled life-long with sculptural tradition, and with symbolic intent — the bulky, melancholic “The Thinker” or “The Burghers of Calais”. The Holburne begins with “The Age of Bronze”, a nude man, hand on head in a suspended gesture of awakening, which made Rodin’s name in 1877, but otherwise the heavyweights are absent; the focus is on smaller pieces especially concentrated on movement.

In 1891, Rodin modelled “Iris, Messenger of the Gods” — a headless woman with splayed legs, genitalia exposed, portrayed as if leaping or flying — on a cancan dancer. This, his most erotically daring sculpture (Lucien Freud slept with it at the foot of his bed), is displayed with the less familiar “Dance Movements”, a group of small arching, stretching, curling figures from 1911 based on acrobat Alda Moreno. Her nude poses, Rodin said, “provide all kinds of new and bizarre arabesques” — far from the formal routines favoured by Degas.

The Courtauld showed the plaster versions in 2016, tracing how Rodin modelled statuettes based on a soaring or plunging Moreno, then dismembered them and reassembled the parts to change shape like a dancer in action. A disjointed element remains in the bronzes — a curious mix of abstracted fragments emphasising shape and form, and art nouveau sinuosity and decorative line. Accused of titillating intent, Rodin called them “pure mathematics”.

By then, neither Rodin nor Degas was in the vanguard. In 1907, Picasso was carving totemic wooden figures with savagely abbreviated faces, and in 1912 came his cardboard and string Cubist assemblages of guitars. To me, these feel closer in spirit to Degas’s “Little Dancer” than to Rodin.

Degas the shy aristocrat and Rodin the publicity-hungry policeman’s son died within weeks of each other in Paris in 1917. They make an odd couple, rarely shown together, so different in approaches, yet united by the same quest towards a modern figural expressiveness. It still thrills, and is an essential chapter in the millennia-long history of sculpture’s interaction with dance.

September 24 to January 8, holburne.org

Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ftweekend on Twitter