143. The Contortionist

If you were asked to name five statues, I bet that one of them would be “The Thinker”, the statue created by Auguste Rodin.

I would like you to try something: 

Sit on a chair that’s low enough for your thighs to be horizontal.  Then, adopt the pose of The Thinker.  

Go on, do it now before you read the rest. 

I expect that you got it wrong on two counts.  Firstly, you will probably have cupped your chin in the palm of your right hand when, in fact, the figure’s chin is resting on the back of his hand and secondly, I expect that you put your right elbow on to your right thigh.  The Thinker has his right elbow on his left thigh.

The BBC’s Arts Correspondent, Will Gompertz, presented a story on the 10 o'clock news last night about an exhibition soon to open at the British Museum involving some of Rodin’s works.  He introduced the story by adopting The Thinker’s pose but he got it wrong, placing his right elbow on his right knee, even although the statue is right behind him

I can’t sit like that and I’m sure that Mr Gompertz would have done it correctly if he were able to do so but he couldn’t. 

In 1906, the photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn and George Bernard Shaw, who was a friend of Rodin, attended an unveiling of The Thinker.  Later, Shaw suggested that Coburn make a nude portrait of him in the same pose as the sculpture.

This is Coburn’s portrait and as you can see, Shaw didn’t, or couldn’t, adopt the correct pose either.

Shaw’s got his left and not his right elbow on his left thigh and the hand position is wrong too.

Actually, I can adopt the right pose but only at the expense of a severe pain in my right shoulder that becomes too much to tolerate after about thirty seconds.  

I have no idea what Rodin had in mind but his model was probably thinking that Rodin was an idiot.   

“No one ever sits like this Monsieur Rodin,” he probably said, with feeling.  “It’s very uncomfortable and completely unnatural.”  

Rodin would have just grunted and lit another Gauloises. 

“And my wrist’s hurting,” the model moaned.  “Why can’t I turn my hand over?  That’s the natural way to sit.”

“Stop whining and don't think conventionally,” Rodin snapped.  “Only another five days.”

The Thinker has been a topic of discussion over the past few days because a curator at The British Museum with too much time on his hands, has suggested that the figure isn’t thinking, he’s mourning.  This assertion is because the back of the hand is supporting the chin and in the statues of ancient Greece, this is how mourning was depicted.  

Rodin called it The Poet originally.  I don’t think it should be called The Poet, The Thinker or The Mourner because he is “The Contortionist”, that’s what he is.