If the Rodin exhibition at the Grand Palais was one of the most anticipated at the beginning of the year, it nevertheless surprised the public. Far from a simple traditional retrospective, the RMN offers us a mise en abyme of Rodin's work and genius.
We expected a meeting of masterpiece with a chronological presentation of the life of Auguste Rodin, we hoped to see Camille Claudel at the turn of a room … Going to this exhibition without expectation and devoid of any criticism, one did not expect to be so pleasantly surprised.
It is a point of view and an original approach that the Grand Palais offers us to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Rodin's death: three axes of reading and many highlights thanks to a regular confrontation with his contemporaries and more recent artists.
The idea is to show how this sculptor, on the margins of his approach, became the instigator of new methods, experimentation, ways of conceiving sculpture and giving birth to bodies.
Rodin Expressionist
Avant-garde, precursor, Rodin was nevertheless able to quickly impose his style and spread a new way of making bodies vibrate. If expressionism became a movement in its own right in the years that followed, we can imagine that Rodin made it take his first steps.
The artist constantly seeks to give birth to movement in volume. In feeling and expressing passions. Although the form is therefore less realistic, you can indeed feel life pulsating.
The fame that will result from this revelation will inspire many artists around Rodin: Bourdelle, Lehmbruck, Zadkine …
Rodin Experimenter
Rodin not only creates, he also spends a lot of time arranging plasters, taking them out of context, grafting them onto others. Constantly seek in the confrontation of bodies new sensation and way of expressing things. This completely new approach will lead to others and the figures created will be used in an infinity of compositions.
Plaster is not the only technique apprehended by Rodin: the exhibition shows us how photography is also one of the techniques in which the artist d'Intereste. Drawing is of course also present and Rodin approaches it in a completely unexpected way for the time. Many artists of the time also discovered a new strength in the line.
Rodin, the shock wave
While Rodin's fame was indisputable during his lifetime, many artists would continue to have consideration for his work and genius in the twentieth century. The horrors of the two great world wars will be an opportunity to reclaim his work and his unique way of expressing bodies. After 1945 his works will be rediscovered and many will draw from them an unsuspected modernity.
After a great wave of minimal and conceptual art, the return to figuration will also be done by the reference to Rodin. His way of animating the material will become the field of new creative play : enlargement, fragmentation, assembly … as much experimentation as Rodin himself could have envisaged during his lifetime.
Today, Rodin is not only a reference and a keystone in contemporary art, but he is above all at the origin of this turning point that led a good number of artists to think about the body in a less academic way.
