You Must Change Your Life by Rachel Corbett Page B

modeled after Arabian souks, alpine chalets and other exotic architecture. A new flâneur -friendly bridge, the arched steel Pont Alexandre III, connected the Champs-Élysées to the Eiffel Tower, which was eleven years old but gleaming like new in a fresh coat of gold paint. The centerpiece of the fair was the Palais d’Electricité, a sixty-foot-tall zinc building topped with a fairy riding in a chariot. Inside, water fountains and mirrors reflected the dazzling spectacle of the electric lightbulb.
    The new glass-domed Grand Palais and the trapezium-shaped Petit Palais were built to showcase the top French art. One showed work from the last century, including paintings by Delacroix, Courbet and Renoir. The other focused on art from the past decade (although it somehow managed to exclude Impressionism entirely). Three works by Claudel went on view, including her Profound Thought , which many saw as a feminist rebuke of Rodin’s The Thinker . It showed a woman in a thin dress kneeling inches from a lit fireplace, her hands clinging to the mantel. Claudel’s Thinker was the picture of vulnerability, without a shred of the manly muscularity of Rodin’s. Dangerous, ambivalent, damning, this was what intellectual life might have looked like to a woman at that time.
    Rodin showed a bust and The Kiss in the exhibition, but that was an inconsequential display compared to his personal, four-hundred-square-meter show down the street. He installed 165 sculptures in the pavilion, including Balzac , The Walking Man , a plaster version of The Gates of Hell and numerous bodily fragments.
    It was by far his largest exhibition to date, yet it did not immediately bring the attention he had hoped for. Rain dampened the opening festivities in June, while the light shows and dancers diverted the public’s eye from the non-spectacle showings. When Rodin complained to Jean Lorrain of the sparse foot traffic outside his pavilion, the poet agreed, “There’s not even a cat on avenue Montaigne.”
    But more serious-minded visitors knew Rodin’s historic undertaking was not to be missed. One of Rodin’s assistants noticed that at least those who did come on that first day seemed more interested in looking at the art than at each other. Word soon spread about Rodin’s strangely sexual, fractured forms and, within a few weeks, the artist found himself greeting Oscar Wilde, members of the royal von Hindenburg family and the modern dancer Isadora Duncan. When the young artist Edward Steichen came by and caught a glimpse of Rodin standing beside his Balzac he vowed to photograph him someday.
    Duncan was so taken by Rodin’s work that she found herself defending sculptures to passersby who were grumbling ignorances like,“Where is his head?” or “Where is her arm?” Duncan would correct them, “Don’t you know that this is not the thing itself, but a symbol—a conception of the ideal of life.”
    The reviews soon delivered more good news for Rodin. The essayist Rudolf Kassner declared him “the most modern among living artists. From the standpoint of history, he is the only one who is necessary. It is not empty phrase when I claim that the development that starts with the Greeks and reaches its midpoint with Michelangelo would not be complete were it not for Rodin.” He was “literally epoch-making.”
    Westhoff and Becker were no less moved by the show. “I was there yesterday, and today again, and these days have simply created an epoch in my life in Paris,” Becker wrote to a friend back in Worpswede, urging them to pay a visit. Rodin, especially, “has captured life and the spirit of life with enormous power. For me, he is comparable only to Michelangelo, and in some ways I even feel closer to him. That such human beings exist on earth makes living and striving worthwhile.” The show galvanized the women in time for their return to