The French government asked Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) to sculpt a monumental door for the future Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 1880. Though it was never used for it, the Danaid remains as one of the 186 figures sculpted for the Porte de l'Enfer [Gates of Hell]. Its success prompted Rodin to reproduce the model in bronze, marble, and in various sizes, several times.
In mythology, the Danaids concealed the pins that they used to murder their husbands in their hair. Once in Hell, they were sentenced to spend eternity filling a barrel with a hole in it. Rodin depicts the distress of one of these women, working on this aquatic, appealing and mortiferous theme. The Danaid is part of an iconographic tradition that portrays naked women with undulating hair, which stretches from Eve to Venus and on to Mary Magdalene. The hair veils and unveils, screens and surrounds, insinuates and camouflages nudity.
The self-abandoning motion of the woman's body dishevels the fleece and reveals the nape, a dark object of desire at last exposed. By revealing her bare back to onlookers, the Danaid extends an invitation into the erotic realm like Ingres' attractive eastern women in the Turkish Bath (1862), or later Edgar Degas' Tub model (1886).
"Thus the Danaid, who kneels and pours her liquid hair."Rainer Maria Rilke (1)
Rodin's aquatic Danaid is as attractive as she is melancholic. She revives the images of Loreley and Ophelia that 19th-century painters and poets cherished. Her hairdo resembling the water's waves and lachrymal arabesques expresses her ambivalent femininity. This fatal beauty doomed to torment drifts between the water of Eros and those of Thanatos.
"The face is lost in the stone like a large sob, towards the hand set in the block's icy eternity."Rainer Maria Rilke
The Danaid emerges from matter, which undergoes a metamorphosis at the artist's hand. Her hair turns the rudimentarily inlaid stone into her body's smooth curves.
(1) Rainer Maria Rilke, Rodin (Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse: Autour de Rodin, 1999), p. 74.
