Rodin and Dance

Beautiful exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery focusing on Rodin’s fascination with dance in his later years.

The show began by looking at his interest in the Cambodian dancers who came to Paris for a state visit in 1906. Rodin became fascinated by their unusual movements and spent three days in Marseilles with the troupe sketching them. If you watch the recent “Fake or Fortune” series on TV you’ll remember that featured one of these drawings. These are very freely drawn and painted works with a real sense of movement.

It then looked at his interest in avant guard dancers of the time including Isadora Duncan, Ruth St Denis and Loie Fuller. The show included photos of them as well as his drawings. I loved a strange photo of Duncan dancing in a garden watched by Victorian men in hats.

The main section of the show focused on a series of small sculptures Rodin made in 1911 called “Dance Movements”.  These were displayed as a wonderful parade of dancers down the middle of the room. It turned out they were all based on two figures he’d modelled which he then broke up and had moulds made of the various parts. He then recast these and put them together in various combinations to produce these beautiful figures. Once you’d read this you had to go back and look again more closely to see the similarities. I wouldn’t have realised this was how they were made if it hadn’t told me.

Around the walls were a series of drawings Rodin had done of nude dancers. Some had been drawn with them in one position but shown so that they were in a different stance. There were also some where he had cut out the outline of the dancer. I really liked these as they seemed more distinct and seemed a mid-way point between drawings and sculpture. Some of the drawings were quite erotic and I was interested to see that the model for many of them, Alda Moreno, had also appeared in an erotic magazine of the time.

Closes on 22 January 2017

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