The illusion of flesh and sensuality is the theme around which the first section develops, in which some early works of a classical style are collected, including the famous Man au nez cassé, rejected by the Parisian Salon of 1864, a portrait tribute to great genius Michelangelo. At the top of this section will be Il Bacio, the scandalous sculpture representing two lovers and caused a sensation in the France of the late nineteenth century, a work that still conquers visitors of Rodin Museum.
The second section offers some of Rodin's best-known sculptures and demonstrates the full maturity of the master also from the point of view of the ability to elaborate the figures that emerge from the white blocks of stone. Alongside portraits of great intensity, far from the cold precision of his early career, such as the bust dedicated to his lifelong companion Rose Beuret, references to eros alternate with the master's uninhibited formal and aesthetic research, demonstrating his need to attempt new sculptural paths. Here the beautiful Mains d'amant are a lyrical reference to love and sensuality, but they already allow us to fully understand the work of recovery of tradition that Rodin carries out together with the affirmation of a new idea of sculpture.
The poetics of the unfinished characterizes the third section where the triumph of the "unfinished" is represented, the linguistic device that immediately refers to Michelangelo and which Rodin develops in a key of absolute modernity, later widely adopted by his colleagues. Here are some of the most beautiful portraits executed by the artist, including that of Victor Hugo and another, little known, by Puvis de Chavannes, the great "decorator of walls", one of the most popular artists of his time.
Rodin had a special relationship with marble and his contemporaries saw in him a ruler before whom matter trembled. His sculptures, far from being conventional, give life and form to modernity, animating the very classic material par excellence, destined by its nature to immobility.
The exhibition makes use of a research activity carried out by the Musée Rodin, which has conducted an extensive historical and critical analysis of the artistic workshop of the French genius and his methodologies for processing stone. For some years now, the Musée Rodin has in fact been committed to restudiding Rodin's marble production, even defining the individual collaborators who worked on the marble blocks. Rodin personally and directly cuts marble for a good part of his career, until the amount of requests due to the achievement (albeit late) of a wide fame forces him to organize a real workshop, without however renouncing to follow the success of all works.
All of Rodin's mature marbles have well imprinted his style, that unfinished that will become known throughout the world, but each piece has its own story, and through them the sense of an atelier that becomes a "workshop" is also reconstructed. In this regard, Aline Magnien writes in the catalogue: "If the sculptor's hand is fundamental for his interlocutors, it is evident how Rodin keeps things separate: on the one hand the conception and the model, for which he assumes full responsibility, from The other is the execution, openly delegated and in which the client does not hesitate to participate, sometimes allowing him to choose the title he prefers. The hand is a crucial point here because the role – real or imagined – that Rodin plays or not in making his marbles is at the center of the valorisation or, conversely, of the criticism of his works during the XNUMXth century”.
This exhibition opportunity has allowed to deepen the investigations on the materials used by the master, but above all to clarify the relationship between the sculptor and the collaborators called to participate in the phases of realization of the work. Also in this case, therefore, Rodin is an anticipator of the contemporary practice - while taking up the customs of the ancient workshops - of delegating the execution of the work to the assistants while maintaining the original conceptual project unchanged. The exhibition, which exhibits the artist's marbles in chronological series, is therefore a journey through the aesthetics and sculptural practice of the French genius. What emerges is a completely new sensitivity compared to his time, where matter seeks sensuality and the nude is exposed with a highly innovative erotic charge.
An extraordinary set-up was designed by the architect and French designer Didier Faustino, to highlight the different sections of the exhibition itinerary and establish a dialogue with the architectural space of the Hall of the Caryatids. Also thanks to Giambattista Buongiorno's lights, Rodin's white marbles will come to life in an evocative and surprising context, which will allow visitors to explore all the themes that characterize his plastic production.
After the appointment in Milan, the exhibition will continue its journey in Rome, on the initiative of the Special Superintendency for Archaeological Heritage of Rome and the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. The exhibition will be set up in the monumental space of the large Aule delle Baths of Diocletian, one of the headquarters of the National Roman Museum, while GNAM will present a selection of Italian sculptures between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to suggest a comparison with the sculpture of the French master.
The exhibition is promoted and produced by City of Milan - Culture, Royal Palace, Rodin Museum in Paris, Civita and Electa, In collaboration with the Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism, the exhibition is curated by Aline Magnien, Chief Curator of the Heritage of the Musée Rodin in Paris, in collaboration with Flavio Arensi. The exhibition presents a corpus of over 60 works with such a vast number of marble sculptures as to constitute the most complete review that has been set up on Auguste Rodin's marbles.
RODIN. Marble, life
Milan headquarters, Palazzo Reale – Hall of the Caryatids
From October 17 2013 to January 26 2014
