Eric’s latest project finally finished, after several weeks of absurdly long hours (on the worst days he left before I got up, and came home when I was already asleep) so he took today off and we went to see the Rodin exhibition at the Royal Academy.

I’m not an art critic and not even particularly knowledgeable about art, so I don’t have much intelligent commentary to offer (and Rodin has probably been commented-on more than enough, anyway) – only a handful of disjointed personal observations. If you want a proper review, try The Guardian’s.


Bronze suited Rodin a lot better than marble. His marble sculptures tended towards a tame smoothness, whereas the bronzes had vigour and character – there was a lot more strength in their movement, and more life in their surfaces.

All of his portrait busts of men were in bronze. Almost all of his portrait busts of women were in marble. His choice, or the subjects’? Quite possibly the latter: one of the women apparently complained about the first proposed version of her portrait that it made her look fat, so the final version was a dreamy soft portrait, with only her face emerging from a large block of marble. Pretty pathetic in a way (easy for me to say!) although I’m sure it was popular. His portraits of men on the other hand sit straight up, so to say, facing forward, eyes open.

Composition is not his strong side. Each figure on its own made a stronger impression on me than the larger groups. Take the Burghers of Calais for example: they don’t really look like a coherent group to me. One seems to be talking to someone outside the group; one seems to be arguing with the others; one has a headache. What’s going on? I’m sure it’s possible to come up with explanations, but a well-composed sculpture shouldn’t need that. I found the composition of The Gates of Hell equally awkward and confusing.

He spent decades on The Gates of Hell even though the commission was cancelled after a while, and still he never finished them. One has to be really obsessed with something to keep going for that long.

Even though the Gates were never finished, a lot of his other sculptures started out as elements in the Gates but evolved into full-scale standalone pieces. So it wasn’t wasted work. More interestingly, he reused several of those elements in a cut-and-paste manner: take the body of this figure, replace its head with that one, oh, and let’s add one of these women as well. “Object-oriented sculpture”, Eric named it; The Guardian draws parallels to Frankenstein.

He often changed the orientation of the figures when reusing them, so a pose that appeared to have been modelled on a more-or-less upright woman might end up being used lying down, or even upside down. Not really noticeable except on a large scale, but then it had a curiously distorting / twisted effect.


PS: I really like the little folding stools that you can borrow at museums.