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'Rules are made to be broken'
The review
THE MAKING OF RODIN
Tate Modern 18 May – 21 Nov 2021 written by Caroline Wheaton
Rodin was one of the reasons I wanted to give sculpture a go. Well…him and Michelangelo. Lofty aspirations, I know. But one of the things that drew me to them was not just their sheer brilliance (although that was kind of obvious) but the fact that they pushed boundaries, did things differently, pushed things forward.
And so it was with great excitement that I ordered my tickets for the latest Rodin exhibition at the Tate – an exhibition which tries to explore just that: what he did and how he did it. His making. How he experimented. His methods of creating.
The focus of the exhibition is Rodin’s work in plaster which, unlike other sculptors of his time, Rodin was happy to exhibit, even though these casts were not recognised as being as important as his works in the more traditional materials of marble and bronze.
His ability to isolate and fragment is another key feature. There are cases full of hands and limbs. All in different positions, all made so that they might be attached to a human form and used to make it slightly different from the one before.
These “abattis” or giblets of work, allowed him to isolate certain features and were key to his making of the Gates of Hell where these pieces allowed him to experiment with proportion, positioning and the final configurations.
Various elements of Rodin’s practice are brought into the spotlight by the curators at the Tate.
Repetition is one of them. Drawings are shown copied and re-used. Sculptures are cast and re-cast, modified to give different effects and emphasise different features. The exhibition highlights his work with two sitters in particular, Ohta Hisa the Japanese actor and dancer, and Hélène von Nostitz, to demonstrate this.
Another focus is the idea of breaking things, dismantling and re-assembly. Rodin’s fascination with the fragmented state of ancient Greek and Roman art appears in his work.
He constantly re-visits, re-forms, purposely breaks, and re-casts in order to re-invent and create. This is brought out through the various displays. In the case of the Three Shades, for example, three identical forms placed together in different positions, make up a singular, powerful sculpture. We find figures in the Gates of Hell reworked into single pieces; the Head of a Slavic Woman, finding its way into many different sculptures.