{"id":172,"date":"2006-10-11T17:39:44","date_gmt":"2006-10-11T22:39:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/wordpress\/?p=172"},"modified":"2006-10-11T17:39:44","modified_gmt":"2006-10-11T22:39:44","slug":"rodin-at-the-royal-academy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/2006\/10\/11\/rodin-at-the-royal-academy\/","title":{"rendered":"Rodin at the Royal Academy"},"content":{"rendered":"

\nEric’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<\/a> at the Royal Academy.\n<\/p>\n

\nI’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<\/a>.\n<\/p>\n

\n

\nBronze 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nAll 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nComposition 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<\/i><\/a> 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<\/i> equally awkward and confusing.\n<\/p>\n

\nHe spent decades on The Gates of Hell<\/i> 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nEven 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.\n<\/p>\n

\nHe 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.\n<\/p>\n

\n

PS: I really like the little folding stools that you can borrow at museums.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art_entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.toomik.net\/helen\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}