In one of the most recognizable scenes of cinema, Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky Balboa takes his iconic run through the streets of Philadelphia. Crossing sparse railroad tracks and passing through the crowded artery of the Italian market, Rocky is greeted with shouts of encouragement as the people cheer on their native son. America’s boxer doesn’t just run all over Philly; he effortlessly glides through it, blending in with each and every neighborhood as though the entire city belonged to him.
His crowning achievement comes as he ascends the steps of Philadelphia Art Museum in leaps and bounds. Raising his arms triumphantly, Rocky’s athletic physique is draped in a baggy gray sweatsuit, mimicking in a way the smock of the artists whose priceless works are housed behind him. One of America’s most beloved blue-collared heroes stands before the museum, elevating the boxer as a work of art, a living statue—a potent symbol of Philadelphia’s gritty athleticism and its artistic inheritance. But Rocky and the Art Museum are not the only unlikely pair on display in the city.
Along the very route Rocky takes in the film, there is a slightly less visible, but equally striking testimony to athlete and artist: the Rodin Museum. Situated between the Art Museum and a neoclassical fountain featuring muscular Greek and Roman bodies in patina green, the Rodin Museum features a small, collonaded entrance guarded by several dark, nymph-like sculptures. It boasts the largest collection of works dedicated to Auguste Rodin, the French father of modern sculpture, outside of the original museum in Paris. What the museum may lack in reputation when compared to the famous Barnes and Philadelphia Art Museum, it makes up for in the story of the institution itself. Its founding was an everlasting tribute to poetic justice, as Rodin exhibited his works in the city nearly a century and a half ago to a mostly unappreciative American audience.
Inside, one can see a replica of The Kiss, in marble, and other smaller statues, as well as some of the sculptor’s larger works such as Saint John the Baptist Preaching, who stands nude, eyes focusing on a sight ahead of him. The dark bronze gloss of these statues presents a lustrous gleam that invites the observer to look more closely at Rodin’s emotive sense of human anatomy.
Rodin broke with the prevailing aesthetics of his time. Rejecting both Greco-Roman and Renaissance-era sculpture, his subjects dealt with all the nuance and subtleties of the human experience, preferring to map out the variety of our emotions in his attention to musculature in his range of bodies, even the ‘imperfections.’ The collection is small, some of its pieces are originals, others replicas. But there is one statue in particular which adds yet a further paradoxical twist to the museum, that of The American Athlete. It depicts a man hunched over, muscular, pensive, an almost exact copy of The Thinker. The model for the statue was a man called Samuel S. White III, the original patron of the museum.
White was a Princeton graduate, scion of a wealthy businessman, and star of his university’s gymnastics team. Upon graduating Princeton, White enlisted as a volunteer to fight in the Spanish-American War in 1898 but was taken out of the war when he suffered an injury. Deciding to leave his brief career as a soldier behind, he crossed the Atlantic and enrolled at Cambridge University to continue his studies. While in England, White participated in one of the early shows of bodybuilding hosted by the father of the sport, a Prussian named Eugen Sandow. Sandow was obsessed with the human physique, envisioning his new sport as modern bodies paying homage to the sculptures of Mediterranean Antiquity. Sandow lays out his vision for bodybuilding in a book published in 1897 called Strength and How to Obtain It. In it, he claims that men ought to aspire their bodies to the ‘Grecian Ideal’—a muscular physique in perfect form and symmetry that bodybuilding today considers as its criteria for performance.
In 1899, White became one of bodybuilding’s earliest champions, winning the top prize. It was this victory that would lead the way to a fateful encounter between the young American athlete and France’s preeminent sculptor at the time, Auguste Rodin.
While on a trip to Paris, White was introduced to the French sculptor, who was so impressed by the American’s physique that he asked the young man to pose for him on two separate occasions, once in 1901 and then again in 1904. The final piece was called The American Athlete. The collaboration between Rodin and White bore more than just a work of art, but a relationship which spanned the Atlantic. White would later go on to amass the largest collection of Rodin’s work and brought it to Philadelphia, making his collection the largest of the sculptors outside of France.
Today, The American Athlete can be seen in Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, but it is easily missed due to its odd placement: close to the exit, across from the men’s restroom. It is not known exactly why the museum’s late patron would be awarded such an undesirable spot in the pantheon of other Rodin sculptures. Unlike Rocky, a semi-fictitious character whose statue features at the base of the Art Museum’s step—a complete tourist attraction, even featuring a guy who sells Rocky-themed shirts nearby—White was an actual person. Moreover, he was an athlete whose very physique had inspired France’s greatest sculptor of that time to select him to model. The American Athlete was not a commissioned work of a vainglorious rich youth, stories of which feature abundantly in the history of art. There is no clear reason why White is not more prominently featured in the museum, let alone the history of Philadelphia.
It is too easy to cast the fate of The American Athlete as something of mere folly by a museum director. If anything, it appears more symptomatic of how generally well-educated and wealthier Americans tend to view bodybuilding and the all-too-masculine obsession with physique. In fact, this critique is no longer limited to the usual suspects: an entire class of health and wellness mandarins have emerged who regard lifting weights and bland nutrition as a particularly Neanderthal preoccupation. Still more, bodybuilding itself contains its own paradox, which may further confuse exactly what it is.
Bodybuilding is often seen as a sport and an art but suffers as both. As a sport, its detractors deride bodybuilders for appearing as athletes, but not training like them. As a form of art, its critics charge bodybuilding as too garish to be taken seriously. Bodybuilding is also a practice that is simultaneously voyeuristic as much as it is ascetic, where stringent diets and social isolation are often the norm to gain a competitive advantage. The great English bodybuilder Dorian Yates was nicknamed ‘the Shadow,’ as he refused to show off his physique before competition. When he stepped on stage, his hulking stature would raise awe as well as horror due to the extreme overdevelopment of his musculature.
Bodybuilding also appears too uninteresting as a literary subject. Whereas a sport such as boxing is celebrated with cultured comparisons to ballet by such iconic American authors such as Joyce Carol Oates or Norman Mailer, bodybuilding doesn’t have such patrons. Bodybuilding, however, lacks the range of literary motifs rife within other athletic ventures: the struggle of man against another, the battle of one against many. Bodybuilding suffers a shortage of metaphors to attract writers because the perception of its pursuit is wholly at odds with the literary richness found in football or boxing.
There is something about the bodies of these athletes that is allergic to the pedantry typical of the modern art scene. Moreover, these bodies elicit visceral reactions on seeing them for the first time, the immediacy of which rarely begs for intellectual commentary. There is a certain irony in sculptures like Rodin’s The Thinker or The American Athlete. In each there is the refined physique, heads propped up above a bulging bicep, the formidable spread of the latissimus dorsi muscles which narrow down into chiseled, narrow waistlines. The very pose of a sitting tripod, hunched over, is suggestive of an activity that appears to be the complete opposite of the brawn of display. That is, thinking.
In 1976, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted a rare exhibit, perhaps the first of its kind, called Articulate Muscle: The Male Body In Art. It featured such bodybuilding legends as Frank Zane, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Ed Corney, all of whom struck poses that intentionally mimicked those of the marble statues of classical Antiquity. It is no coincidence that several bodybuilders in what is now known as the Golden Age of the sport possessed a certain affinity toward sculpture, and many of the metaphors they used, from the artist’s chisel and the barbell, were attempts to elevate their sport into the domain of high culture. In the Whitney, the select audience was probably among the more animated the museum has ever hosted, as each bodybuilder received resounding applause. It was only the art experts on the panel who were overtly bored. In a review by The New Yorker, an anonymous Columbia University professor of art condemned the exhibition for displaying “[t]he worst excesses of the Victorian Era.” As banal a comment as could ever be made about bodybuilding, there is truth to what first impressions provide the observer. For the academician, it was a reaction that quickly rendered abortive any potential narrative of these men. But the long hours suffering under weights, the highly restrictive and measured diets, and the self-imposed solitude—are these not the very features which allow the rest of us to see the punishing lengths of dedication in the artist or writer of the past?
The great German poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a small tract on Rodin while serving as his secretary in the sculptor’s final years. Observing Rodin, the young Rilke noted parallels that many in the bodybuilding world would understand almost immediately:
This earnest, self-centered worker who had never sought for material and who desired no other fulfillment than was attainable by the increasingly maturing mastery of his chisel thus penetrated through all the dramas of life. The depths of the nights of love unfolded themselves to him and revealed the dark, sorrowful and blissful breadth of a realm like that of a still-heroic world in which there were no garments, in which faces were extinguished and bodies were supreme. With senses at white heat he sought life in the great chaos of this wrestling, and what he saw was Life.
Rodin, who died in November 1917, has remained a hero to generations of bodybuilders. Hans de Roos, a Dutch art historian and world-renowned Rodin expert, noted that the sculptor began to turn more toward athletes than professional models, particularly as the latter appeared too ‘studied’ in their poses. Bodybuilders, whose practices involve not just dieting and training, but also posing, have an intimate relationship with the movement patterns of their bodies, understanding the biomechanics of even the most overlooked of muscle fibers. It is perhaps why sculptors have continued to be fascinated by these unique athletes for decades: their very existence reveals the intricate details nature bestows upon man. Nearly a century after Rodin’s death, The Belfast Telegraph reported that Arnold Schwarzenegger had commissioned American sculptor Ralph Crawford to create a piece after ‘the Austrian Oak’ that was to stand nine feet tall. When asked about his selection of artist, the legendary bodybuilder made no hesitation in replying why: “[Crawford] has been known in the physique world as a Rodin. Everything is very dramatic.”
Writers, academics, perhaps others, may raise an eyebrow at tethering the legacy of Rodin to the sport of bodybuilding. It smacks of triviality, a factoid being passed around like wine at a dinner party. But for bodybuilders, Rodin’s legacy is as towering as it is collegial. An American bodybuilder embraces a French sculptor’s vision to deliver muscularity from its Greco-Roman martialness, just as the sculptor captures the humanity of the bodybuilder’s contemplative form. Both chiseling away at the contrived boundaries between what is an art and what is a sport.
