Rodin’s Kiss

In his own words, Auguste Rodin – one of the most prominent sculptors of the nineteenth century – was like a moon that shone on an immense, unknown sea where ships never passed. He was born in 1840 in Paris in a family with a modest background, and his artistic interests – centered on pencils and clays – were supported by his father. In his late adolescence, he was refused thrice admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris’s leading school of art, because of his early old-fashioned taste in arts. He belonged to traditional school of sculpture, while judges at the Ecole had Neoclassical taste. The refusal, however, turned out to be a blessing in disguise for the artist in order to be what he became known for later in his life.

Known to be a naturalist, Rodin believed conflict and suffering to be trademarks of modern arts. This helped him depart with the traditional Greek idealism of sculpture and monumental expression in his works and focus more on emotion and character. Immensely renowned for a wide range of his works, including The Thinker, The Age of Bronze, The Walking Man, The Burghers of Calais, The Gates of Hell and The Kiss, Rodin, in his heyday, was associated habitually with high-profile artists, intellectuals and social influencers. His social circle included Pierre-Auguste Renoir, the eminent French Impressionist painter, and Claude Monet, a founder of French Impressionist painting, with whom he shared a lifelong friendship. Rodin said that it was Monet who helped him comprehend clouds, light, sea and cathedrals.

"Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened beast, dying from unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its passion." While Rodin may have professed this to express the importance of suffering and emotions in his works, his statement somewhat depicts the circumstance of Camille Claude – Rodin’s muse, assistant and mistress – in his life. Camille met Rodin when she was seventeen, and he forty-two or forty-three.

Copy of Rodin's 'The Kiss' at Rodin Museum in Philadelphia

The duo, in their more than ten years of affairs, formed an intense but blustery relationship and artistically impacted each other. Camille served as a model for several of Rodin’s works and assisted him on various assignments, becoming his most talented pupil. However, her intense relationship with Rodin was eclipsed by the latter’s unwavering association with Rose Beuret – Rodin’s lifelong partner – who he eventually married a few weeks before her death. Camille’s exasperation with Rodin’s refusal to abandon Rose finally led to separation between the master sculptor and his pupil in 1898, years after which Camille suffered a mental breakdown.

"I have fallen into an abyss. I live in a world so curious, so strange. Of the dream that was my life, this is my nightmare." - Camille Claudel

While there may not be any equivalence between Camille’s tragic love and melancholic elements and connotations of Rodin’s hugely famous work The Kiss, which depicted the illicit love between Francesca da Rimini and Paolo Malatesta in thirteenth century Italy, it’s worth reflecting on. Francesca, a high-class woman, falls in love with her husband's younger brother Paolo, and both of whom are stabbed to death by Francesca’s husband while the couple reads a book on courtly love. Rodin, in his work, depicts the moment before the two lovers intended to kiss each other; Paolo also holds the book in his hand, in the sculpture. Almost equally ailing was Camille’s romance with Rodin.  

Following her separation with Rodin, Camille’s mental health worsened over several years. She escaped Rodin’s umbra but succumbed to a nervous breakdown. In 1913, her family confined her to a mental asylum and later to a psychiatric hospital where she remained for around thirty years until her death. In her seclusion, she rarely received any visitors; Camille’s mother refused to see her daughter again, while her brother visited only occasionally in thirty years.  

Rodin had always shown his desire that there would be a room showcasing Camille’s works when a museum dedicated to his own work started in Paris. The Rodin Museum was inaugurated in 1919, two years after Rodin’s death. However, Rodin’s wish to have a Camille Claudel room in the museum took more than thirty years to materialise; in 1952, Camille’s brother donated four major sculptors by her to the museum.

Recently, in a major recognition to the sculptress’ talent, a museum entirely dedicated to her, the national Camille Claudel Museum, opened earlier this year in the north-central French town of Nogent-sur-Seine. Although Camille destroyed several of her sculptures when she was alive (“I took all my wax studies and threw them in the fire... that's the way it is when something unpleasant happens to me. I take my hammer and I squash a figure.”), the newly opened museum boasts of a collection of around 90 of her works, dispelling the gloom of isolation and obscurity that besieged her entire personal and artistic life more than a hundred years ago. 

When Disaster Strikes

Conversations about disasters are often tinged with dismay and grief. In the aftermath of a large fire that engulfed Grenfell Tower in the North Kensington area of London on 14 June, the world witnessed a story being circulated about a child rescued from the 16th floor of the building 12 days after the fire broke out. What initially seemed to be a miraculous slice of good news, with users on social media buying in the heartening story, eventually turned out to be a false narrative.

Around 80 people are presumed to have been killed in the fire, which took around 200 freighters more than 24 hours to control, but only after it had destroyed at least 150 homes in the tower and its vicinity. Narrative serves as the terminus a quo for recovery. A wide array of discussions is now being held in the regular media and social media, and the UK government is coming up with the stricter implementation of fire safety policies to prevent further catastrophes. 

      

Amanda Ripley in her book ‘The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes ­– And Why’, which later turned into a PBS documentary, says that we worry about horrible things happening to us, but we do not know much about what it actually feels like. We flirt shamelessly with risk today, constructing city skylines in hurricane alleys and neighbourhoods on tops of fault lines. But as we build ever more impressive buildings and aeroplanes, we do less and less to build better survivors.   

Our disaster personalities are more multifaceted and primordial than we think. But they are also more pliable. As William Irwin Thompson said, “Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. “ It’s only when catastrophes hit us that we realise our potential. Disasters often start quite modestly, and it’s a proven fact that majority of serious accidents, including significant aircraft damage, severe injuries and fire, are survivable.

Luck during disasters is not to be trusted. Also, relying solely on the response by emergency officials may not be of much help, given that no professional lifesaver or staff of emergency response team can be everywhere immediately. In many instances, delayed or poor mitigating measures by the authorities have rather exacerbated the situation than resolving it appropriately. Many forms of disasters may be predictable, but surviving them may not. The bigger and more complex the catastrophe, the more and probably longer we will be on our own.

As Ripley impeccably sums up in her book, we have more control over our fates than we think. But we need to stop underestimating ourselves. We need to train ourselves to function more quickly and show better judgment under disastrous circumstances. 

Costly Protectionism

Trade has never been just about economics and finances. It has also been deeply inter-linked to political economy and geopolitics. During the European colonial period between the 16th century and mid-20th century, regional powers such as the Great Britain, the Netherlands and France set up colonies in Africa, Asia and the Americas, and followed a form of economic nationalism called Mercantilism purely aimed at boosting the home economy. However, as part of the post -Second World War developments, which included the dominant British Empire giving up its theory of Mercantilism and the US becoming more internationalist, the focal point of trade became not solely aimed at increasing prosperity, but also at improving relations and bind countries together in order to engage in fair commercial competition and avoid any future wars.

Globalisation and the extension of trade over the next few decades after Second World War brought incredible benefits to the global economy, particular to the US where income per capita nearly doubled during the period and the country further established itself as the world’s wealthiest and the most powerful nation. However, recent years have experienced a pushback and strong political activism against globalisation. Critics advocate that the significance of globalisation is waning, as trade is not the solution for developing sustainable socio-economic growth that it once was. Industrial robots engaged in manufacturing are not an employment boon either, they allege.   

French far-right leader Marine La Pen hailed 'Brexit' as a 'dazzling lesson in democracy'

With countries seeking to fortify their sovereign identities, the rapid rise of populism has recently surprised the political establishment in several countries across the globe. This anti-globalisation – a so-called ‘politics of rage’ – largely contributed to Britain’s rejection of the EU in 2016 and the victory of Donald Trump as the US president later that year, as well as the rise of nationalist political parties in parts of Europe and Asia. While governments, socio-economic experts and intellectuals have termed the populism as irrational, they also have failed to acknowledge that a substantial number of the population shares an opinion that the current political and economic system does not have much to offer.     

Those favouring populism are people who think that the globalisation has profited only a small and privileged elite, but not them. Seeing through their vantage point, it appears rational for the bottom majority of the population to ask why they get only a few percent of income gains. A recent report by a leading British think tank, Resolution Foundation, suggests that workers in the UK are set for the worst pay growth decade since the Napoleonic wars. There is a need to concede that the current wave of populism is a repercussion of global economic failure, and protectionism is not a cure for this.

The vulnerability of protectionism or any other form of economic nationalism is that it misleads us into believing that our problems are born abroad and can be quick-fixed by stringent policies. Factually, a large number of major economic setbacks in the modern economic history of the world have been domestic in origin. Globalisation is under threat, and the need for governments, policy makers and civil society groups is to properly articulate the benefits of globalisation to the public. The threats of adopting a protectionist approach should be better conveyed to locals, and communities adversely affected by open markets and free trade policies be better compensated for their losses.