Rodin, Flesh, Marble, exhibition

Breathing life into marble.

During the renovation of the Rodin Museum in Paris, the temporary exhibition space at La Chapelle hosts the exhibition entitled Rodin, flesh, marble. Fifty marble statues and a dozen models in clay and plaster are presented, bearing witness to the importance of this material and the treatment which Rodin reserved for it. If modern criticism has primarily defined Auguste Rodin as a modeller and a plaster man, his contemporaries saw him as a god of stone before whom "marble trembled". Rodin's marbles, far from conventional, give life and shape to the modern soul, "the disjointed psyche, brutal and delicate, spirited and weary, negative and fervent." Rodin managed to animate this classical and conventional material which was doomed, on the face of it, to immobility. Flesh, which sculptors from antiquity onwards have attempted to represent, became more alive than ever in Rodin's work.