Word: rodine
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...conviction: some of the best of the modernists are edging away from abstract designs and are beginning to rediscover the human frame. In so doing, he believes, mid-century artists are trending back toward Rodin-and the century's early spirit-after a long spell of sculpture-as-geometry. In demonstration of his idea, Ritchie has assembled a remarkable exhibit of 103 pieces of 20th century sculpture and put it on display in the Philadelphia Museum...
Holes & Lumps. Ritchie's show begins with some of the early giants: Auguste Rodin's skin-smooth St. John the Baptist. with its supple lines and easy Renaissance grace; Arietide Maillol's pensive Mediterranean, heavier and thicker; Constantin Brancusi's early abstractions. All the abstractions of the '20s and '30s, says Ritchie, flowed out of the work and theory of those three men. Rodin used to say that sculpture was merely "the hole and the lump"; his admirers carried the idea to a ruthlessly literal conclusion...
...Henning wanted something more. In France he had been impressed by Rodin and Maillol; he had also read the love poems of Ovid. He began to develop a style of his own with small statues of intertwined lovers in clay. He was urged to do major pieces for exhibition. "I don't like exhibitions," grumbled Henning. But he did more figures, and at 44 he let people have a look. The cheers have been ringing in Henning's ears ever since...
...Patient." Gwen John was in her 30s when she met Rodin. But Rodin was in his 60s, and busy with a complex public life. "Be patient and less violent," he admonished her. Yet the illustrious sculptor was fond of Gwen, and wrote frequent letters scolding about her health. And even after she entered the Roman Catholic Church she clung to Rodin for love and comfort. "My heart is like a sea which has little sad waves," she wrote. "But every ninth wave is big and happy...
Gwen John spent the last 25 years of her life living and working in poverty at Meudon, near Paris. After Rodin's death, she turned her devotion to a collection of cats; almost the only humans she suffered were the nuns of Meudon and the orphans they cared for. She took Holy Communion each day, but when she was absorbed in painting she would forgo Mass for a month at a time. Her style changed drastically: while her early canvases were built up from thin, fluid paint, she now changed to thick paint, made her colors lighter and lighter...