Rodin and Dance

Yesterday I visited the Courtauld Gallery - always a pleasure (what a great gallery it is) - to take a look at Rodin and Dance: The Essence of Movement. This is a fascinating, tightly focused exhibition that traces the course of the great sculptor's late-life fascination with dance in various forms, some of them bordering on acrobatics. There are sketches - some more finished than others, some coloured in with blots of watercolour, others dashed off with pencil on paper in a few suggestive lines - and there are ranks of little terracotta models, few of them finished, most just quickly moulded (but eloquent) working models. All this work is the fragmentary record of a hugely ambitious, unfinished project whose ultimate aim was to capture movement, in its most intense and fluid form - dance - in the most static of media, sculpture.
 Happily I toured this exhibition with my cousin, who is a dancer and better able than I to appreciate the finer points, decipher what is actually going on in some of the more confusing sketches (is that an arm or a leg?) and to spot the occasional lapse from the merely difficult to the anatomically impossible. Rodin was constantly adjusting these sketches, sometimes using movable paper cut-outs or creating sets of slightly varying copies of the same drawing. Some of the sketches show the same pose from different angles, and some are so ambiguous that Rodin helpfully labelled the bottom of the drawing 'bas'. This way up.
 Rodin took his inspiration from many sources - not, primarily,  classical ballet (the preserve of Degas) but modern dance, acrobatic dancing and traditional Cambodian dance. The last fired Rodin's imagination when the national dance troupe visited France - there's a striking photograph of the elderly artist sketching them from life - and modern dance came Rodin's way via Diaghilev's Ballets Russes; there are sketches of Nijinsky himself in the strange angular poses of the Faun. The principal muse of Rodin's dance project, however, was a Parisian dancer and acrobat called Alda Moreno, whose extraordinarily flexible body we see photographed in an arty nude mag as well as in sketch after sketch, model after model by the fascinated Rodin.
 This quite small-scale exhibition inhabits the kind of cosy space that encourages visitors to chat about what they're looking at, usually making cheery comments along the lines of 'I wouldn't like to try that' or 'Could you do that?' What everyone tries to ignore is that most of these drawings depict naked bodies, often posed in positions that leave no doubt that the women are women and the men men. The pudenda femina and their male analogues follow you round the room, as it were. No wonder nude ballet never caught on.