Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession,
Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY
April 20 - July 3, 2004
The Albright-Knox is presentis the exhibition Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation. This fascinating exhibition features approximately 60 bronze sculptures from throughout the artist’s career, including many of his best-known and most-loved works: The Thinker, The Kiss, The Cathedral, Monumental Head of Pierre de Wiessant, Monumental Head of Balzac, and The Three Shades.
"Rodin is considered to be 'The Father of Modern Sculpture' because he revolutionized sculpture in the late 19th century," said Ken Wayne, the Gallery's Curator of Modern Art and organizer of the exhibition for its presentation in Buffalo. "He took sculpture in entirely new directions from what he believed it had become – somewhat stale, lifeless, and boring. Instead, Rodin injected passion, feeling and life into sculpture."
The exhibition also features works on paper by Auguste Rodin and a photograph of Rodin by legendary photographer Edward Steichen, plus large-scale documentary photo blow-ups for background. A special educational component will be a three-dimensional display explaining the lost-wax casting process by which bronze sculptures have been produced for centuries.
All of this material will be further supplemented by two Rodin sculptures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery’s own collection, Eve and the Age of Bronze, allowing regular gallery visitors an opportunity to see familiar works from the museum’s permanent collection in a fresh, new context.
Auguste Rodin is recognized as the most important sculptor of the modern period. He expanded the range of subjects for sculpture, not limiting it to historical and religious figures or scenes. He consciously sought to reinvigorate the sculpture medium by injecting passion and emotion. Rodin avoided the literalness of academic sculpture by introducing the modernist qualities of ambiguity and open-ended meaning whereby a sculpture could have several meanings instead of just one. An excellent example is his famous work The Thinker. What is he thinking? Who is he? Why is he naked?
Another major contribution to modern sculpture was the fragment or partial figure, which Rodin felt held great power and mystery. He got the idea for making partial figures from the many ancient fragments that were surfacing on the Paris art market in the late 19th century following archaeological digs. Rodin reasoned that if we can admire and revere the many broken and partial ancient figures, such as the Venus de Milo, why can we not make such figures? Indeed, he saw himself as the true heir to Phidias, the ancient sculptor. He wanted to return sculpture to its rightful path after it had lost its way because of academic sculptors. Like the ancients, he wanted to create sculpture that embodied his time.
Born in 1840 to a modest French family, Auguste Rodin in his teens attended the government school for craft and design. Here he learned by drawing plaster casts of ancient sculpture and by modeling in clay, modeling being the basis of sculpture in his day. Although he sought admission to the École des Beaux Arts (the very prestigious government school for fine art), he was rejected three times. Rodin's struggle for recognition dominated his early career. For years he earned a living by producing, as an anonymous member of a workshop, ornamental sculpture for Carrier-Belleuse, a successful decorative sculptor of the period. While his work as a craftsman provided a steady income, Rodin yearned to exhibit his own work under his own name. In the 1860s he submitted his sculpture to the annual juried Paris Salon exhibitions – the most important shows of their day – but suffered a series of rejections. (His work was finally admitted in 1877.)
During Auguste Rodin’s lifetime, the most highly regarded sculptures were projects done for public places because they were thought to have universal rather than personal meaning. These projects were usually commissioned by committees specifically formed to oversee the creation of these works. Rodin received his first public commission in 1880; it was to create a sculptural entrance for a (never-built) museum of decorative arts in Paris. He chose to design the door as a showpiece for Dante’s The Divine Comedy, an epic poem written about 1308, which was very popular in France in the 19th century. The work Rodin created is called The Gates of Hell.
In the years that followed, Rodin was commissioned to create other monuments, including The Burghers of Calais (1884-88), the Monument to Honoré de Balzac (about 1897), and the Monument to Victor Hugo (about 1897-1900). In 1900 Rodin stood at the pinnacle of success: an entire pavilion at the Paris World Exposition was devoted to a retrospective exhibition of his work. In 1908 he moved to the Hôtel Biron, a large home where he lived and worked until he died in 1917. A year before he died, Rodin donated this estate and his studio and its contents to the French government, in exchange for France’s agreement to establish a museum there. Today the Hôtel Biron is home to the Musée Rodin.
B. Gerald Cantor (1916-1996) and his wife, Iris Cantor, built the largest private collection of Rodin works in the world: approximately 750 large- and small-scale sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and memorabilia. The Cantors have generously shared their collection with others through exhibitions and donations. They have given more than 450 works to more than 70 museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The Stanford University Museum of Art received 187 of those works.
The Cantors’ support of the arts was recognized in 1995 by President and Mrs. Clinton, who bestowed upon them the National Medal of Arts. The current exhibition has been organized and circulated by the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, which was established to promote and encourage excellence through the support!of art exhibitions, scholarship, and the endowment of galleries and sculpture gardens at major museums. Since being established in 1978, the Foundation has circulated various Rodin exhibitions to more than 150 venues in the United States, Japan, Australia, Canada, and Singapore, attracting a total audience of more than 5 million people.
ALBRIGHT-KNOX ART GALLERY
1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo, New York 14222
www.albrightknox.org
