The Art of Auguste Rodin

  • 24 December 1981
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When August Rodin exhibited his first freestanding figure "The Bronze Age" in 1877, it caused a furious controversy. Faced with the precision of its anatomical detail and its uncannily lifelike sense of moveement, many spectators claimed that it was almost certainly cast from a live model. It wasn't. They were simply unprepared for the shock of encounntering the work of the greatest sculpptor since Michelangelo.

Rodin was born in 1840 and from the age of 24 worked as a mason for several years. An opportunity to achieve independence arose in 1871, when he was dispatched to make some decorative figures for the new stock exchange building in Brussels. He finished the jo b working on a freelance basis.

He professed an admiration for the work of an earlier, 17th century French sculptor, Pierre Puget, who worked a great deal of the time in Italy, but found little public success in France, where neither his Baroque tendencies nor his difficult temperaament found favour with the classically inclined Louis XIV.

Rodin's interest in Puget led him on to Michelangelo, the Italian genius of the Renaissance, whose work proved to be the single greatest influence on the Frenchman. In view of Rodin's pre-eminence, it is important to underrstand the influences that shaped him. For although he was the most innovaative and celebrated sculptor of his day, his work is all the same grounded firmmly in tradition.

Like Michelangelo he employed such devices as selective degrees of finish, at the most extreme having a section of perfectly modelled form emerge from a slab of rough, hardly touched stone. This, and the general expressiveness of his approach, set him against the prevailing academic stanndard. Like the Impressionists, who were changing the course of the hisstory of painting, he found himself at odds with a reactionary establishment, but, coming later, he did not encounnter anything like the same degree of violent opposition.

Rodin invented the idea of treating the fragment as whole: a piece of sculpture that encompassed only one part of the body treated as an organiccally complete piece of work. ThIs notion pervades his entire output, and there are numerous examples in the show at the Municipal: truncated torsoes, intertwined hands, headless bodies. This device proved to have enormous influence on the developpment of sculpture. Its impact is still felt today, in the fragmentary figures of F. E. McWilliam, for example, whose work was shown in a major retrospective in the Douglas Hyde Gallery earlier this year.

Unlucky in his public commisssions, Rodin had endless trouble with clients. They generally disapproved of what he came up with. When the Calais town council saw the finished "Burghers" they refused to erect it in the town. Another piece, an equesstrian portrait of General Lynch, was destroyed in Santiago by a Chilean revolutionary before it was erected. His portrait of Victor Hugo went through several stages before it was. accepted, while the commissioning cdmmittee refused point blank to accept his controversial statue of Balzac, though it was eventually ereccted.

By 1900 Rodin was so celebrated that the Paris Universal Exhibition featured an enormous show of his work, which proved to be extremely popular. In 1980 he moved to the Hotel Biron, a state funded establishhment for artists and writers. When he died in 1917 it became the Musee Rodin, containing most of his work. By the end of his life his reputation had declined. His true greatness was, to a large extent, obscurred by his public fame. The Municipal show offers a unique opportunity to survey the entire range of his work. •

An exhibition of work by Rodin and his contemporaries, featuring many of his most famous pieces, including "The Thinker". "The Cathedral", and three studies for "The Burghers of Calais", is on show in Dublin at the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art until February 6, 1982. Apart from 27 bronze sculptures and 8 drawwings by Rodin, the exhibition feaatures 15 sculptures by his contemmporaries including Renoir and Picasso.