The Making of Rodin

Stunning exhibition at Tate Modern looking at how Rodin’s work in plaster and how he kept these pieces and combined them in various works.

The main room was set out to recreate his 1900 exhibition in Paris with sculpture from his whole career like an artist’s studio. It included various studies for The Thinker, a statue of Balzac, Walking Man and others. It was wonderful to see so many large works in a big space and it set you up for the detail of the rest of the show. A good approach in these Covid times to have such an open space.

Off that room was a small room of drawings to demonstrate another working practice, as with his sculptures, he reworked and copied drawings often generating new works independent of the original drawing.

There was good room on two of his female subjects Helene Von Nostitz and the Japanese actor and dancer Ohta Hisa known as Hanako. I loved the large selection of the studies of the latter which only depicted her face in various stages of reality and abstraction.

I loved the room on The Burgers of Calais pointing out how they were modelled as nudes which were then draped in fabric dipped in paster and draped over them. It also looked at how elements of them were reused.

Finally the show looked at how he was inspired by antiquities and classical statutes and was himself a collector. In some cases he combined ancient terracotta vessels with small plaster figures as in my second photograph. These reminded me of Antony Gormley’s “Field” figures.

Closes 21 November 2021


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