Rodin From Every Angle: A Cornucopia of Shows for the Holidays

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/arts/design/rodin-shows-new-york-philadelphia-review.html

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Auguste Rodin was a choreographer in bronze. Anticipating the 20th-century fashion for cutting up and reconstructing the human body, he treated the figure as a repertory company of separate expressive instruments, each to be played as loudly as possible.

He also anticipated the application of mass production to fine art, running a shop of as many as 50 craftsmen who turned out hundreds of versions of his most popular pieces in different sizes, combinations and mediums — marbles, plasters and terra cottas — many made long after his own death in 1917. This puts museums seeking to commemorate Rodin’s centenary in a tricky position. What do you get for the man who has everything?

The answers vary at four celebrations of his work and legacy, in New York City and Philadelphia.

One response, “Rodin at the Brooklyn Museum: The Body in Bronze,” is a thoughtfully arranged and edited reintroduction to this sculptor’s oeuvre. In addition to nearly 60 bronzes donated by Iris and B. Gerald Cantor, it includes two and a half minutes of delightful footage showing the artist in a giant black beret, filling his beard with marble chips as he guides a chisel through stone that gives way like butter.

But its special focus is on Pierre de Wiessant, one of six figures in Rodin’s famous “Monument to the Burghers of Calais.” These prominent citizens of that French port city gave themselves up to the English to end a siege during the Hundred Years’ War, expecting to be hanged. But as befits an incident destined to become a patriotic legend, their bravery was rewarded with clemency instead.

In the slightly-larger-than-life preliminary nude of Wiessant that begins the show, Rodin captures both the posing model and his own process with uncanny precision. A lanky man with close-cropped hair, Wiessant holds up one hand, fingers flared, and turns his head deeply to the right. It’s a formal pose of resignation, but beneath that performance, the model’s attitude of tautly patient obedience is equally clear. A gash in his chest and a ridge of extra matter under his right biceps remain as artifacts of the sculpture’s making.

In the draped final version, on display in the central gallery, Wiessant is bursting at the seams: His frame remains lanky, but his arms have bulked up, his fingers are splayed almost violently, and his thumb is bent back. His every facial feature, from the wrestler’s ear to his jutting lower lip, is lifted out just a bit from the skull, as if taking its turn to solo.

At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which inaugurated its dedicated Rodin gallery in 1912, while he was still alive to donate work, the answer is an alternately illuminating and overwhelming collection of additional context. The show, “Rodin at the Met,” offers eerie moonlit allegorical scenes by Pierre Puvis de Chavannes that enliven Rodin’s sprightly bronze portrait bust of that painter. Edward Steichen’s dramatically moody photographs of Rodin’s masterpiece, his strangely leaning monument to the novelist Honoré de Balzac, emphasize the sculptor’s influential vision of Balzac as a self-creating demiurge. Scores of other contemporaneous paintings throw the Met’s own extensive collection of Rodin busts, burghers and caryatids into relief.

But the most illuminating juxtaposition is that of a bronze study for Balzac’s head with the terra-cotta bust of a resident of Balzac’s native Tours that Rodin used for reference. The clay head is extraordinary for its exacting realism. You can see the sinuously well-fed division between cheek and jowl. The eyes are cast down, and the mouth slightly parted, as if, poised but uncertain, the man were awaiting permission to speak.

In the bronze beside it, Rodin has narrowed Balzac’s face to a hatchet, extended the nose, exaggerated the eyebrows and changed the passive expression into one of active preparation, as if the author were about to do a walk-on in his own “Comédie Humaine.” To eyes trained by a century of Cubism, Expressionism and TV cartoons, the bronze might not look stylized by itself, but next to this terra-cotta bust, it has the heightened unreality of a Kabuki mask.

The Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, with over 140 bronzes, marbles and plasters representing the stages of Rodin’s career, has an installation called “The Kiss” on the subject of that passionate sculptural embrace. It was updated this month with a version of “La Valse” (“The Waltz”), on loan from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection. This small piece, cast in bronze around 1905 by Rodin’s student and lover Camille Claudel, brings the room alive like a dash of salt.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a recently rediscovered and attributed Rodin marble bust of Napoleon, from 1908, in which the young conqueror shimmers like ice. The piece is on extended loan from the Madison, N.J., borough hall, where it sat quietly for eight decades until a recently hired archivist noticed the faint signature on its side.

But the most ingenious showis the Barnes Foundation’s reprise of “Kiefer Rodin,” an exhibition at the Musée Rodin in Paris. Invited to respond to Rodin’s 1914 book, “Cathedrals of France,” on the decay of the French Gothic cathedral, Anselm Kiefer produced an exhibition of new paintings and sculptures that call attention to every one of the old man’s shadows.

In its small introductory room of Rodins, glass-enclosed shelves lined with identical plaster legs and rows of tiny, discolored feet suggest mass murder, while a selection of Rodin’s drawings seems designed to highlight his uncomfortably domineering and sometimes almost pornographic treatment of the female subject.

But then Mr. Kiefer’s own over-the-top aesthetic, in 10 free-standing vitrines containing mysteriously symbolic installations and in three gigantic paintings of cathedrals in the goth-brown tones of burning photographs, echoes back to illuminate the way both men have used their bombastic but rigorously precise exaggerations to emphasize otherwise faint shades of formal and emotional color.

“A. R. A. K.” (2017), a 13-foot-high painting composed of two stacked canvases, shows a whitish-blue marsh and pale violet reeds covered in impastoed globs and slash marks. Two double helixes of rusted metal hang down over its face, one for Mr. Kiefer (A. K.) and one for Rodin (A. R.). What struck me as the piece’s most significant point, though, is that it’s divided twice — once by a painted horizon line, across which the reeds are reflected, and once by the crack between the two canvases.

To me it suggests that nature and art, or perception and memory, aren’t so easily distinguished, and serves as proof that the most honest way to look at a long-storied artist is through a contemporary artist’s eyes.