L'Art

Rodin's conversations with Paul Gsell, published in 1911, remain the house's source text. Rodin speaks without system: of the nature that contains everything, of the moment when the artist chooses and pulls focus, of a beauty that is not what one adds but what one learns to see. This edition takes up the public-domain text, established and annotated, preceded by a new introduction that situates it. Nothing has been forcibly modernised; the language of 1911 keeps its precision. Here one reads the sentence that gives Doinel's line its name: 'Beauty is everywhere. It is not she who is lacking to our eye, but our eyes which fail to perceive her.' The book is composed like a manual of seeing, chapter after chapter, from modelling to movement. It founds what the house publishes: the idea that seeing is a labour, and beauty a decision.