Word: rodins
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...into consciousness even as gravity drags it down. You think of Genesis and the lump of clay just on the point of turning into Adam (the first sculpture of all). A little less thought, less work, and they would only be lumps. Tucker had taken a long look at Rodin, and it shows everywhere on his bronzes. The heavings and incrustations of their skins are, in fact, exquisitely organized to carry the eye around the form and leave no dead or slick patches on the surface. Groping, malleability, squeezing, thumbing bespeak a flat-out commitment to the tactile...
...diametric opposite, Thomas Couture's pedantic warning to the Third Empire, The Romans of the Decadence, ancestor of all Cecil B. DeMille orgies. In the distance, on a raised loft that stood where the trains once came in and out, was a grimy white gleam: the spectral plaster of Rodin's Gates of Hell. In a side gallery, a visitor furtively ran his finger over the marble nipple of a luscious demimondaine writhing naked among stone roses, once the sensation of the salon of 1847, whose model had been apostrophized by Baudelaire...
...million visitors annually to gaze at its superb Cezannes, Monets, Renoirs, Van Goghs and Lautrecs. There was a residue of 19th century work from Paris' former Musee National d'Art Moderne, whose 20th century collections had already been siphoned off into the Centre Pompidou. Major sculptures, including Rodin's original plasters, came from the Rodin museum in Paris; others were recovered from obscurity in warehouses where they had languished unseen since before World War II. Versailles, Fontainebleau, the Museum of Decorative Arts and the Museum of Ceramics at Sevres surrendered their treasures. Bequests given long ago to the state...
...hundred years ago you had brilliant painters and dumb museums; today the reverse. It is inconceivable that the marginality and hamfistedness of most of what passes for major painting at the end of the 20th century could have been taken seriously in the Paris of Degas, Cezanne and Rodin. Under the heat of the market, avant-garde and pompier have simply fused into an opaque, complacent lump. Only in the museum, it seems, can the full evidence of creativity be reconstituted. If we are to enter the world of our great-grandparents and discover why their values...
...Auguste Rodin called John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) the "Van Dyck of our times." Sargent was the unrivaled recorder of male power and female beauty in a day that, like ours, paid obsessive court to both. He could make old money look dashing and paint the newest cotton-reel magnate as though he were descended from Bayard. Sixty years after his death, his "paughtraits" (as Sargent, who kept swearing he would give them up but never did, disparagingly called them) provoke unabashed nostalgia. In his Belle Epoque sirens, in the mild, arrogant masks of his Edwardian gentry, are preserved...