Auguste Rodin – Challenging Beauty | V&A

In the V&A Museum we're fortunate to have 23 sculptures by Rodin and all the large-scale ones we have are exhibited in this gallery. They show the development of his style from his earlier works of the 1870s where he was very obviously influenced by Michelangelo and by classical sculpture, to then going through the 1880s where he was very influenced by psychological studies and inner emotion and these lead on to the 1890s where he was really radical with fragmentary sculptures, really challenging traditional notions of beauty and appropriateness and paving the way for modern sculpture. Rodin started work on this figure in 1875 and in spring 1876 he broke off from his work to Italy and he was absolutely blown away by the sculpture of Michelangelo in particular, also Donatello, and also classical sculpture. So those were key influences when he came back to produce what he wanted to which was a very beautiful male nude. At the time this sculpture was exhibited in plaster people accused the sculptor of maybe casting it from life, so literally cheating, taking a cast of a human body and Rodin was absolutely incensed and in fact he never again cast a figure this life size. The age of bronze from the very outset brought Rodin to international recognition but it was very controversial. It was partly his choice of model so Rodin decided to choose a soldier and critics thought that it was utterly lacking in charm or beauty. The other reason why it was quite controversial was what was it all about? He does look perhaps dejected, he's certainly internalised his emotion and you can see that with his closed eyes. He would have been holding a lance in order to hold the pose and Rodin took that away with the final figure and so it's a bit puzzling. You wonder why is the arm raised? What is it about? Why even call it the age of bronze? Is that about the awakening of humanity? Is that about even Rodin awakening to his own talent somebody suggested? So it was very controversial, it was very very far removed from the idealised beauty of sculpture in the previous century. After the controversy of the age of bronze and the accusations of it having been cast from life, Rodin reacted by creating this figure and again he had a controversial choice of model. He chose an Italian peasant called Pignatelli and when Pignatelli came to his studio, Rodin described him walking up onto the platform and very naturally having his legs the way you can see them here and Rodin was so pleased to have this spontaneous pose that he wanted it captured immediately. He decided that it was very appropriate for Saint John the Baptist to depict somebody moving forward, energetic, speaking, preaching and this element of bringing a fourth dimension to sculpture was one of Rodin's modern characteristics. He wanted to depict movement over time and you see this again and again. Rodin was really interested in the play of light on bronze sculpture and the effects that you could get with faceting the bronze so leaving it a little bit rough but also leaving it with an interesting texture of different colours on the surface. Bronze if it's left outside naturally turns green if it's not protected because of the copper content in it but Rodin decided that green was a fascinating colour for modern sculpture and in this figure you can see he's actually layered the pattern up so you have green and black and you can see both together. Rodin was endlessly inventive so in his body of work you can see the same form reoccurring in a different scale, in a different position, so he rotated and recycled sculptures and this is an example. This figure appeared on the gates of hell, it appears here upright with its arms outstretched, it was combined horizontally with another figure to create a completely different work called Fugit Amor, so love fleeing away, being captured, and then he reused it 180 degrees, turned round, falling dramatically down, so this recycling, rescaling, reusing was very new in sculpture. This figure is called the Prodigal Son but traditionally in history of art, in painting and sculpture, the prodigal son of the bible story comes back to his father and is really contrite but instead of which in this figure you don't have him with his head bowed, you have him with his head stretching backwards and in fact every ounce of his body is stretched out in distress, so he's using the body physically to convey the inner emotion of this figure. This figure is the Crouching Woman and it's one of the most shocking sculptures in existence. This cast is absolutely unique and it quintessentially conveys Rodin's approach to the human body becoming more and more radical. It's derived from an earlier work called Iris, Messenger of the Gods and you'd expect a classical goddess to be elegantly dressed, perhaps to be obviously beautiful and here she's not, she's everything but, so her legs are stretched out in movement but then he goes much further. Not only is the head absolutely not classically beautiful at all but he's cut off parts of this figure in a really shocking way, in fact so much so that you can see inside the work of art, you can see how it's made and he was very keen on that being part of the finished work to show the process in which it was created. This is one of Rodin's fragmentary works of the 1890s and this is where he was getting increasingly experimental to challenge your idea of what you would expect to see in a human form. Do you need to see a human form or could you in fact take the human form as the start of a piece that instead looks at light and shade and emotion and in this figure the emotion is completely internalised so hence it being called the inner voice. You can see she's twisting in on herself on purpose and the shape of her body is accentuated by the casting lines, the seam lines which he's left on purpose here, he's actually making them a feature of the work so you can see this human body as a series of shapes, as a series of textures with the rough against the smooth and as this very twisted internalised figure. This sculpture really is the essence of Rodin's fragmentary works, it's a head, it's a very very large fragment but in fact in Rodin's mind it's a finished sculpture and he was interested at this stage in the play of light and shade on the bronze and you see it really dramatically in this deep dark cast and the play of light on the back of the head particularly which is no longer even curved as a human head is, it's bulging out and so he faceted sculpture on purpose to produce these effects. Rodin was very influenced by classical sculpture, he'd seen it in the Louvre, he saw it in Italy, he drew it extensively and that was partly in terms of the human body but even in terms of a plinth. When he had an exhibition of his own work in 1900 he used plaster casts of classical plinths to display sculpture and it gives it a sort of status if you like but here it is a plaster cast of this classical plinth in his own collection mounted on a wooden board, we've left it exactly as he had it and there's a strut inside to support this incredibly modern bronze on the top. This is obviously a female torso but it's quite abstracted so there's nothing very clear about it, it's very ill-defined on purpose. From the back Rodin described female models sitting with their legs outstretched in front of them and he said when he viewed their backs they looked like a classical vase containing the life of the future so he's not just here representing a female body, he's actually conveying a concept. In July 1914 there was a major exhibition of modern French art in London, there was only one room of sculpture and it was the Rodin room so by this stage he had absolutely gained international recognition and he chose that group of works to present to the British public. In early August the war was declared and the casualties were immense so by November when these sculptures were still stranded in London, Rodin was very moved, he was quoted in the press as saying the English and the French are brothers, your soldiers are fighting cote a cote side by side with ours, as a little token of my admiration for your heroes I decided to give the sculptures to the V&A.