An exhilarating showdown
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece
This show has all the makings of the ultimate sculptural showdown. In the one corner, Auguste Rodin, the first great sculptor of the modern era, who rebelled against the sterile imitations of neo-classicism but was obsessed with actual ancient Greek sculpture; in the other, the works that ignited his passion, the British Museum’s Parthenon Marbles, which Rodin first encountered on a visit here in 1881.
The exhibition presents some of Rodin’s most iconic pieces, on loan from Paris’s Musée Rodin, beside the ancient marbles – generally agreed to represent the summit of classical sculpture – that inspired them. Given the French sculptor’s veneration for the artists behind the Marbles, the show shouldn’t feel like a competition. But you can practically smell Rodin’s desire to best his own standards, and those of the past; to fuse the core elements of classical sculpture into a new art relevant to the machine age.
The show has wow factor from the first room, with three of Rodin’s most famous works visible as you enter: The
Kiss, The Age of Bronze and The Thinker.
In the centre of this dramatically lit tableau stands one of the most famous of the Parthenon Marbles – of two headless, recumbent goddesses. You might expect that the ancient works would appear cool and static beside the more modern pieces, with Rodin’s animated surfaces grasping at the tactility of human flesh through a kind of sculptural equivalent to impressionism. In fact, you could hardly have a better example than this majestic piece of the way ancient Athenian sculptors breathed new life into the rigid forms of the archaic Greek imagery that preceded them.
Beside the mesmerising flow of drapery covering these female figures, the entwined couple in The Kiss (1882) have a sort of Joy of Sex clunkiness with their slightly too-white plaster flesh. The youth in The Age of Bronze (1876), on the other hand, radiates a lustrous energy. His nakedness represents not the godlike idealisation of ancient Greek art, but a modern existential turmoil.
So the show proceeds through a series of brilliantly conceived standoffs and juxtapositions: The Thinker, 1902, versus the headless, reclining River God Ilissos from the Parthenon’s West Pediment; Rodin’s headless bronze Iris Messenger of the Gods (189091) next to the shattered torso of a striding woman. If Rodin’s touch feels a touch galumphing in the first encounter, his visceral sensuality carries the day in the second.
With his magnum opus, The Burghers of Calais (1884-89), seen here in a heart-stopping coup de théâtre, it’s the six enormous male figures silhouetted against the window at the end of the gallery, Rodin seems to have moved on from the classical, or at least transformed it into an intensely dramatic narrative language. And with the show’s final work, The Walking Man, 1907, he’s turned another corner, with the headless, armless figure seeming about to stride into the 20th century, carrying Rodin’s pioneering enthusiasm for the “fragment” – not as a broken relic, but an expressive form in its own right – into the modernism of Picasso and Matisse.
It might be pointed out that the Parthenon Marbles can generally be seen for free, as can many of Rodin’s key works in museums around London (The Burghers normally resides at Victoria Tower Gardens, beside the Houses of Parliament). But seeing these works piecemeal you’d lose the heroic, larger-than-life mood that makes this one of the shows of the year. You’ll leave it exhilarated about the possibilities of sculpture, nostalgic for an age of superhuman ambition, and still pondering that question of who “won” the show’s notional showdown.