26 April – 29 July 2018
Discover how ancient Greek
sculpture inspired Rodin to set a radical new direction for modern art.
In 1881 the French sculptor
Auguste Rodin visited London for the first time. On a trip to the British
Museum, he saw the Parthenon sculptures and was instantly captivated by the
beauty of these ancient Greek masterpieces.
Like many archaeological
ruins, the Parthenon sculptures had been broken and weathered over centuries,
but Rodin took inspiration from the powerful expression that they conveyed
through the body alone. He even removed the heads and limbs from his own
figures to make them closer to the broken relics of the past. By doing so, he
created a new genre of contemporary art – the headless, limbless torso.
A hundred years after his
death, see a selection of Rodin’s works – including his iconic sculptures The
Thinker and The Kiss – in a new light. This major exhibition will feature
original plaster, bronze and marble examples of many of Rodin’s sculptures on
loan from the Musée Rodin in Paris. For the first time, they will be shown
alongside some of the Parthenon sculptures that the artist so admired, as well
as selected objects from his own collection of antiquities.
Experience the magnificent
sculpture of a modern master, and explore how the ancient world shaped his
artistic vision.
Both artists were the most
famous sculptors of their lifetimes. Despite living centuries apart, Rodin
wrote and spoke as if he knew Pheidias personally. Seeing his hand at work in
the sculptures of the Parthenon, Rodin imagined Pheidias as a friend and
teacher who guided his hand as he created representations of the human form.
No artist will ever surpass
Pheidias… The greatest of the sculptors, who appeared at the time when the
entire human dream could be contained in the pediment of a temple, will never
be equalled.
Auguste Rodin, 1911
Like Pheidias, Rodin did
not personally carve everything that we put his name to. Rodin was sometimes
seen posing for the camera with hammer and chisel in hand, but he did not carve
in marble himself. He preferred to model figures in clay, and then have them
cast in plaster or bronze. If he was working in marble, he would delegate the
task of copying the clay model to a stone carver under his personal control. In
this, his practice may not have been very different from that of Pheidias. It
is most unlikely that Pheidias would have carved any part of the architectural
sculpture of the Parthenon, but he very probably designed it, fashioning models
and making drawings for the pediment and frieze.
Sometimes we can see
Rodin’s admiration for Pheidias at work in compositions that have not always
been acknowledged. One such example is the comparison between the pose of a
figure in the cavalcade of the Parthenon frieze and Rodin’s The Age of Bronze.
In The Kiss, the sculpture
transcended its original purpose to become representative both of Rodin’s own
works and of a new naturalism in the history of art. The Kiss has almost become
a cliché demonstrating how great works of art become overfamiliar. But by
placing The Kiss together with these figures (below, likely of goddesses) from
the east pediment of the Parthenon, we see almost for the first time the
miraculous ability of both Rodin and Pheidias to conjure warm flesh out of cold
marble.
The final coupling from the
exhibition we’re highlighting here shows a goddess (figure K) from the
Parthenon’s east pediment – headless, armless – with Rodin’s Walking Man, also
headless and armless. The one is raising herself from her seat, the other strides
out of the exhibition into a different world, that of modernism and abstract
expressionism. In Walking Man, we can see how Rodin radically lopped off the
head of his own sculpture in order to make it more like the Parthenon
sculptures.
Rodin is unique in the
history of art for his intense determination to bridge the gap between the past
and the present. What mattered for him in his own work was the expressive power
of the body and he found it in the works of Pheidias.
https://blog.britishmuseum.org/rodin-and-ancient-greece-a-perfect-pairing/
#RodinExhibition
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