From Rodin to Giacometti: Sculpture and Literature in France 1880-1950 (review)

REVIEWS ment and sculpture have a larger place here. It concludes with John Dixon Hunt's exposition of the various ways in which words are integral to our experience of gardens—from actual "extra-visual" directional or informational signs or implied verbal cues within them to "extraterritorial" names that refer us beyond the features that bear them to the larger world outside the garden. This latter category is made possible not only by the ways in which gardens are places ofmemory, but because all gardens, according to Hunt, implicitly contain an idea ofthe garden, such as that ofits being a "third nature," distinguished from both the first unmediated realm of God's creation and the second ofcultural landscape. The essay makes a turn midway away from its word-oriented concerns, enjoining us not to neglect the virtually unverbalizeable aspects ofgarden experiences, to focus briefly on the subtleties of aural and tactile sensations in gardens. Finally, it concludes with the idea that unlike other verbal/visual combinations, gardens constitute sui generis spatial art because their '"scripts' are endlessly subjected to fresh 'performances'" and imbued with paradoxes like "vertical/horizontal, measurable/immeasurable, environment/landscape , homogeneous/heterogeneous," which our critical discourses have not yet begun to figure (319). Thinking about gardens is thus a fitting conclusion to a rich and varied offering ofperspectives on the interrelations ofwords and images, one that invites us to continue critically imagining beyond them. Wendy FarisUniversity ofTexas-Arlington KEITH ASPLEY, ELIZABETH COWLING, AND PETER SHARRATT, eds. From Rodin to Giacometti: Sculpture and Literature in France 1880-1950. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 2000. 236 pp. + ill. What connections might exist between sculpture and literature? This is the broader question posed by this thought-provoking volume, which focuses on the rich confluence of the artistic and literary worlds in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury France. While the interrelations ofpainting and writing have, oflate, been an area ofkeen interest for scholars ofmodem France—Alexandra K. Wettlaufer's Pen vs. paintbrush: Girodet, Balzac and the myth ofPygmalion in postrevolutionary France provides an outstanding recent example—until now, relatively little attention has been paid to analogous interrelations between sculpting and writing. From Rodin to Giacometti takes a significant first step in this direction. It includes essays by curators, art historians, and literary scholars, drawn from papers delivered at an international conference held in 1996 at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, during a major Giacometti retrospective. Contributions are organized chronologically, and informed by a wide variety of approaches, from historical and ideological, to sociological and psychoanalytical, to more philosophical and theoretical. While the sculptors and writers considered are generally familiar , the works examined range widely, from canonical favorites like Rodin's Gates ofHell to such intriguing yet little-known creations as Edgar Degas' poetry and Paul Valéry's sculpture. The book opens with editor Peter Sharratt's preface, "Ut sculptura poesis"— which recalls the Horatian "Ut pictura poesis"—positing the relationship between literature and sculpture as parallel to that between literature and painting. Exploring this unfamiliar realm, Sharratt contends, "may enhance our understanding ofthe common creative process in which writers and sculptors are involved and of the Vol. 26 (2002): 156 THE COMPAKATIST way words and sculptural images combine to produce meaning" (1). This introductorypiece is followed by Michael Bishop's essay on Rodin which, contrary to much criticism that tries to explain away Rodin as a brilliant anomaly, seeks instead to situate the sculptor within the broader "poetics ofhis time" (11). Anne Pingeot then examines the general phenomenon of "literary sculpture" in nineteenth-century France, while Penelope Curtis looks at one ofits fascinating yet neglected aspects —Emile-Antoine Bourdelle's engagement with the regionalist Félibrige movement, out ofwhich develops his practice of"sculpting in patois"; and Richard Kendall, in turn, focuses on Degas' poetry, Valéry's sculpture, and their interrelations. Six of the next eight essays focus on the work of what might best be called "high modernist" figures. Peter Read reflects upon "the significance of fictional sculptures in the poetry and prose of [. . .] Guillaume Apollinaire" (75), in light of the latter's art criticism andjournalistic writing on modem sculpture; and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine explores "resemblances and proximities" (85...