DUSTIN KRAUS

“Art must be protected. First, art is a counterforce against nihilism. It’s only through art that we can value something without a notion of utility. Corot’s landscapes can’t be strolled through, nor can we stand with Liberté in Delacroix’s famous scene, but we cherish these works nonetheless.

Placed in direct contact with beauty, uselessness becomes genius. In the increasingly soulless world of urban gentry and technology, the idea of genius provokes scorn. But even an atheist like myself requires spiritual sustenance. Caravaggio’s portraits and Raphael’s frescoes provide that sustenance.

Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.

Auguste Rodin

Image: Eugène Druet  -  Auguste Rodin examining an Egyptian statue 

Artemis: See archive for more Rodin. A lot of Rodin. :)  HERE