Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern
Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Mass., through Sept. 18
Auguste Rodin is practically a household name and his most iconic sculpture—The Thinker—is even more ubiquitous, said Karen Wilkin in The Wall Street Journal. “Can an exhibition of this familiar artist’s work be anything but predictable?” The answer, happily, is “a resounding yes,” as the Clark Art Institute is proving this summer with a show that focuses on how changing American tastes helped lift the French sculptor (1840–1917) to the status of legend. In the 50 sculptures and 25 drawings gathered here, “we see the artist in all his guises: innovative, radical, seductive, histrionic, sentimental, tough.” But what nearly torpedoed Rodin was the sensuality of his work. From the 1890s through the 1940s, his “remarkably sexy” marble and bronze figures were often deemed too racy for public viewing. Yet that same trait may explain why he attracted so many quiet champions.
“Rodin’s deepest passion was for the flesh; the exhibition makes that clear again and again,” said Murray Whyte in The Boston Globe. Consider Iris, Messenger of the Gods (1895), a female nude striking such a powerfully carnal pose that the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston never displayed the edition it was gifted in 1908. When Cupid and Psyche traveled to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, it was hidden away, to be viewed only by request. “Here’s where rich Americans, perhaps with a secret lascivious streak, play a part”: A few such patrons began collecting and advocating his work. Still, the breakthrough occurred in 1954, when New York City’s Museum of Modern Art obtained an edition of Monument to Balzac and proclaimed the 1898 bronze a modernist masterwork. This Balzac isn’t nude. Rodin rendered the great novelist instead as a “garishly morose” figure swathed in a heavy cloak. “It’s pure schmaltz, and just wonderful—Rodin, in a nutshell.” And as clever as the curators’ framing is, it’s Rodin’s reliable talent for the theatrical that makes this exhibition special.
The MoMA acquisition changed everything, said Sebastian Smee in The Washington Post. With it, “Rodin finally came into focus as the genius and innovator that he was, an artist whose processes, strategies, and expressive prowess linked him more with 20th-century sensibilities and methods than with the greats who preceded him.” Especially in his later years, he liked to show his hand in his work. When you look at a Rodin figure, “you are looking not only at a rendering of human anatomy but also at the traces of someone touching and shaping that anatomy.” Like a true modernist, he “wanted us to perceive his touch, to make it and the emotions it arouses synonymous with the sculpture.”