Cast authorized by Musée Rodin, Paris
Galerie Georges Bernier, Paris
Private collection, since 1977
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art, Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Auguste Rodin - Camille Claudel, 7 July - 22 September 1996, no. 49, p. 173, ill. p. 110
Andros, Museum of Contemporary Art, Basil and Elise Goulandris Foundation, Glancing at the Century, 28 June - 20 September 1998, pp. 26-27, ill. p. 27
Hand is probably the part of human anatomy that intrigued Rodin the most. He casted it tirelessly, seeking both to render its extraordinary muscle complexity and also to represent emotions that one would usually expect to read on a face. According to Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin’s secretary for a time: “In Rodin’s work there are hands, independent small hands, which although they do not belong to a body, are living. There are hands that rise up, irritable and angry, and hands whose five bristling fingers seem to bark like the five false heads of Cerberus”. It is undoubtedly the Clenched left hand, presented here, that Rilke refers to last.
This work of blatant intensity, despite its simplistic subject, unveils Rodin’s main desire in his work: “I have always tried to render inner feelings through the mobility of muscles. The illusion of life is obtained in our art only by good modelling and by movement. These two qualities are like the blood and the breath of all good work”. In fact, this hand seems really alive, shaken by a pain that forces its owner to clench his knuckles, like a feline ready to leap. Placed in the opposite direction with the fingers towards the sky, the hand evokes rather a hand ready to crush, to punish, obeying a divine force.
The Clenched left hand is therefore part of a symbolistic series of hands carried out between 1895 and 1910, referring to the divine power through this single detail of human anatomy.
.
