Word: rodins
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...would be hard to think of an artist who better deserved all this effort. Rodin had no successful followers because, as V.S. Naipaul once remarked of Charles Dickens, "the very magnitude of his vision, its absorption into myth, precluded as grand an attempt." There would, of course, be great sculptors after Rodin, but none of them, not even Henry Moore, was able to release such torrents of expressive power from the sole image of the human body. Pathos, energy, despair, entropic exhaustion, orgasmic pleasure: every shade of meaning, every opposed sensation that the body can display, found its way into...
...Rodin had very few inhibitions; flesh, both his own and others', was a source of inexhaustible fascination to him, and the erotic fury one often senses in his squeezing and manipulation of the clay was by no means a metaphor. One of his friends recorded a conversation with Rodin in his old age, as the sculptor talked about an antique copy of the Venus di Medici that stood in his studio: "He spoke in a low voice, with the ardor of a devotee, bending before the marble as if he loved it. 'It is truly flesh...
...myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (the sculptor falling in love with the figure he had carved) had vast resonance for Rodin; in his marble Pygmalion and Galatea, 1910, the girl emerging from the stone seems literally shaped by the carved sculptor's own passion, as though the contrasts between consciousness and dream, body and effigy, art and life, subject and object could all be packed into one erotic metaphor. No wonder that when he made his image of The Sculptor and His Muse (circa 1890), the Muse's hand was laid encouragingly on the sculptor's genitals...
...sculpture now appears unassailably better than that of any of his French contemporaries-a point vividly made by the first court of the exhibition, in which representative works from the salons of the 1870s are juxtaposed with Rodin's. This witty melange serves to indicate what Rodin absorbed by way of themes, images and treatments from lesser men like Jean-Paul Aubé, whose figure of Dante conversing with a damned soul may have helped start the train of thought that led to The Gates of Hell, or Alexandre Falguière, whose monument to Lamartine is distantly echoed...
There is the overwhelming sexual frankness, and the refusal to idealize the body's postures; Rodin's poses do not belong to earlier sculpture. Then, finally, there is the fragmentation of the body itself as a sculptural object. Rodin's work was permeated by his love of Michelangelo and the expressive power of the non-finito, the sculpture as unfinished block. But his use of the "partial figure"-the headless striding man, the ecstatically capering figure of Iris, Messenger of the Gods-went beyond such conventions as the body not yet released from its mass...