Exhibitions
THE MAKING OF RODIN Tate Modern, London, to 31st October
Room 36 may be one of the smallest in the National Gallery but it is also one of my favourites.
In it hang just four paintings: two by Claude Lorrain and two by Turner, who had left his Dido building Carthage and Sun rising through Vapour to the Gallery, on the condition that they always hang between the older master’s Seaport and Mill. He passionately admired and learned much from Claude, but was determined to show that he could outdo him.
Rodin could be seen as the Turner of 19th-century sculpture, each building on their previous generation but outstripping them by far. As David Ekserdjian, the authority on bronze sculpture, has pointed out, there were other great and innovative 19th-century sculptors – Carpeaux and Dalou in France, Gemito in Italy and Gilbert in Britain – ‘but, even so, Rodin stands alone’.
Rodin’s Claude was Michelangelo, whose work he first encountered in Florence in 1876. Thirty years later, he wrote to Bourdelle, one of his many talented assistants, saying, ‘It was Michelangelo who liberated me from academicism, and from whom I learned, by observation, rules that were diametrically opposed to the ones I had been taught.’
Another former assistant, Brancusi, thought Rodin’s work superior, and derided Michelangelo’s sculptures as ‘nothing but muscle, beefsteak − beefsteak run amok’.
Also like Turner, Rodin was determined that his work and fame should live on. Turner wished that the thousands of paintings and drawings he bequeathed to the nation be kept together. Similarly, a year before his death in 1917, Rodin gave the bulk of his works and collections to the French state. In November 1914, he had presented 18 sculptures to the V&A as a memorial to
French and British troops already killed in the first months of the Great War.
Rodin is very much a flavour of our time. In London in 2014, there was a fine show of privately owned works at Bowman Sculpture, followed in 2018 by the British Museum exhibition pairing him with Phidias, another of his heroes. Now this Ernst & Young Exhibition at Tate Modern, in partnership with the Musée Rodin, is showing over 200 works, many previously unseen in Britain.
To an extent, it recreates Rodin’s own 1900 show at the Pavillon de l’alma, which consisted not of bronzes but of the original plaster models from which they were cast. It explores his methods and gives a sense of his workshop.