Re-writing Rodin

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) crafted his image as carefully as his work. The great self-mythologiser cast himself as a solitary, brooding genius and liked to be photographed chipping away at marble figures with a chisel. The irony, of course, is that Rodin worked mainly in terracotta — other people handled the plaster work, the casting, patinating, chiselling and carving. In an exhibition at Tate Modern, Rodin’s radical brilliance is celebrated, but some of the myth dismantled. “It’s not a take-down,” says curator Nabila Abdel Nabi. “It’s a take-on. A take-on of a very complex artist. He was an entrepreneur and he used the new art of photography to build up and disseminate his work. But he also used it to act the part of the artistic genius. We’re trying to take a more considered approach to his working environment, to modulate that very male image. He needed other people to help bring his vision to life.” Those other people were very often women, such as his collaborator Camille Claudel, his beleaguered wife Rose Beuret, and the actress Hanako. “We’re very careful in the show to acknowledge the uneven dynamics between a white, male sculptor and the many women with whom he worked,” Abdel Nabi continues. “Claudel was an artist in her own right and worked with him for a very long time. But there was an imbalance of power and she was in a secondary position. We’re trying to insert her voice wherever we can.”

We’re accustomed to the heft and physicality of Rodin’s works in bronze and marble. But an unexpected aspect of Tate Modern’s show is that it concentrates on Rodin’s work in plaster. “These works have rarely been shown outside of France,” notes Abdel Nabi. “Audiences haven’t typically encountered them because plaster has been dismissed in art history as a transitional or secondary material.” The departure point for the new exhibition is Rodin’s own
self-curated exhibition at the Pavillon de l’Alma in 1900, when he chose to display his life’s work almost entirely in plaster. “That self-curated show was a pinnacle moment for him,” explains assistant curator Helen O’Malley. “He finally had the opportunity to present his work the way he wanted to, in plaster, in a very dynamic way.”

A fascinating aspect of the show is the way it builds new paths to the artists who followed. Rodin was already working on paper cut-outs, which would become so synonymous with Matisse, and Abdel Nabi points to the ways he pre-empted some of Duchamp’s ideas: “We see Rodin as representing this cusp moment at the turn of modernism. His ideas ripple right across the 20th and 21st centuries. One of the most incredible moments in the show comes from Rodin’s series of assemblages. He was a collector of ancient artefacts from Rome, Egypt, Japan and China. From the early 1890s until his death, he collected 6,000 pieces including Etruscan cups and Roman amphorae. But in 1895 he started to appropriate some of those terracotta vessels, incorporating them in his own works. Some of his plaster women interact with the vases — in some cases they’re toppling out of them and in other cases they actually become the body of the vases. It’s a fascinating moment. In many ways it prefigures modernist experiments, whether it’s surrealist objects and assemblages, or the readymades of Duchamp.”

I first visited the Musée Rodin in Paris as a teenager, foolishly assuming that I knew his work already: the commanding, monolithic bronze of Balzac; the expressive, rough-textured head of Bernard Shaw; the vast Gates of Hell (1917); the radically modern Burghers of Calais (1889); the strange Walking Man (1900) who appears to be moving but whose feet are both fixed to the ground. What I hadn’t been prepared for were his delicate, shimmering, mesmerising watercolours. These works form an entrancing part of Tate Modern’s show and, as O’Malley explains, they’re pivotal to Rodin’s sculpture: “Typically, artists’ models adopted fixed, academic poses. But Rodin wanted his models to keep moving through his studio and would capture them on paper very quickly. The drawings feel alive because they were created in a very active, vibrant way. Rodin said the drawings were key to his practice. He was using them in the same way he was using plaster — at an incredible pace — and you can feel the energy channelling through them.”

The timing of this exhibition is perfect. We’re remembering people we’ve lost and worrying how best to memorialise them. Rodin’s ideas are still powerful more than a hundred years on. The Burghers of Calais, being shown for the very first time outside Paris, expresses a hesitancy, an anxiety, a fragility that feels far more appropriate to the present moment than strident declarations of ceremonial power. “Rodin revolutionises what a monument comes to be,” says Abdel Nabi. “The convention had been to focus on one heroic figure, but instead he decided to focus on six tormented, separate men. And he started to toy with the idea of removing the pedestal by bringing them right down to the ground. That was a really radical move at the time. People could weave through the six of them. Sculptures, for Rodin, were always about becoming, always in process, always moving.”

And there’s one more critically important aspect to this exhibition: it’s a celebration of the thing that we’ve perhaps been missing the most — the power of touch. “There’s a hunger now to have a real physical encounter with art,” says Abdel Nabi. “Rodin understood the power of touch and made it the subject of his works — all his gouge marks, his nail marks, the seams, the lines of the cast. That sense of tactility and process that he placed at the core of his sculptural practice seems very timely when we’ve all been separated from each other for so long. To see his fingerprints on the surface of his artworks is amazing. He’s still present, even now, and we can see his touch.”