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Past Exhibitions: 2003Auguste Rodin: The Cantor Collection of the Brooklyn Museum of Art
May 3–August 24, 2003
The Age
of Bronze Auguste Rodin (1840–1917),
the towering sculptor of the nineteenth century and arguably the
most important sculptor since Michelangelo, is the subject of an
important exhibition at the Museum of Art this spring and summer.
The work of this highly inventive and visionary sculptor straddles
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it epitomizes many aspects
of sculpture of the nineteenth century, yet is marked by innovations
whose influence extended far into the What made Rodin such an
exceptional artist was the degree to which he could both honor
and accept the canons of traditional figural representation—and
how he could also completely violate and transform those norms
into dynamic new figural inventions. A famous example of the former
impulse is his early work The Age of Bronze (1876). The
sculpture reflects a deep commitment to observation from nature
as well as knowledge of antique sculpture, particularly that of
Greece. Carole McNamara In celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, this exhibition has been organized by the Brooklyn Museum of Art from the collection donated by Iris and B. Gerald Cantor and their Foundation. The Ann Arbor presentation of this exhibition is made possible by Pfizer Global Research & Development.
Additional support has been provided by Thomas H. and Polly W. Bredt, the Doris Sloan Memorial Fund, the Katherine Tuck Enrichment Fund, and Carol and Jeff Whitehead.
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twentieth.
Early in his career Rodin’s work was highly decorative and
commercial and a number of his sculptures carried the name of his
teacher at the time and not his own. However, through his restless
imagination he created sculptures that would, in his mature pieces,
far surpass any other sculptural work produced during his lifetime.
At the time of his death in 1917, Rodin was the most famous artist
in France, and his public monuments occupied important locations
throughout central Paris. His stature as a creative force in France
was so great that the year before his death he gave the contents
of his studio—comprising thousands of works—to the
French nation with the understanding that the government would
dedicate a museum to honor his contributions. The site selected,
the magnificent eighteenth century Hôtel Biron, where Rodin
had briefly lived earlier in his life, is now the site of the most
comprehensive collection of his work. Rodin’s studio in the
Paris suburb of Meudon was also made into a museum dedicated to
his sculpture.
While
he was working on the figure Rodin made a pilgrimage to Italy to
study the works of Michelangelo at firsthand. The Age of Bronze is
a superb synthesis of all of these influences and interests apparent
in Rodin’s work. When the life-size version was exhibited
at the Paris Salon of 1877, however, it was considered so naturalistically
accurate that he was accused not of modeling the work in clay,
but of taking a cast from the living model, a Belgian soldier.
This charge he vehemently denied, and period photographs of the
soldier in the same pose show where Rodin departed in his modeling
from slavish replication. During his work of the next several decades,
Rodin began to take liberties with the depiction of the body that
sometimes rendered the human form as all but unrecognizable fragments.
Characterized by a dense working of surface forms and volumes,
he no longer felt that the body needed to be depicted whole and
complete. There were instances when just a fragment—a hand,
a torso, perhaps a foot—were sufficient to convey the ideas
and emotions he sought. He could scrap a figure that displeased
him, but retain a head or other part that he could incorporate
into a later work. This freedom to recombine figural parts in new
combinations underlies many of his greatest works, including The
Burghers of Calais and many of the smaller compositions that
comprise the stunning The Gates of Hell. Smaller compositions
from the The Gates of Hell, such as the Torso of Ugolino’s
Son, Paolo and Francesca, and Glaucus each exhibit
portions that were borrowed from (or are shared with) other groupings
on the Gates. In a massive undertaking such as The
Gates of Hell, Rodin mastered the visual vocabulary of misery,
desperation, and anguish much as did the carvers of medieval cathedral
doorways with their depictions of The Last Judgement.
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