Writing in the Washington Post 2004, Sidney Lawrence compares a contemporary sculpture to Auguste Rodin's famous "The Thinker." The contemporary work is Robert Mueck's untitled, double-sized man that everyone calls "Big Man."
"'Big Man,'" Lawrence writes, "is Rodin's 'Thinker' for our times..."
If this is true, we might want to worry. We like to think that Rodin's naked, hunched figure is puzzling over something big, like, say, Descartes' algebraic negative roots, or why Napoleon was always sticking his hand in his vest for those portraits.
The flabby giant fashioned by Mueck (rhymes with Buick), on the other hand, doesn't exactly convince as a solid representative of the thinking class. He just looks too petulant, too sulky, to have much going on behind his furrowed fiberglass brow.
What's extraordinary is that these two sculptures -- one created in 1890, the other in 2000 -- appeared in Buffalo that year in what might be called a meeting of the mismatched minds. If you compare Muerk's figure with Rodin's multi-figure work the contrasts are even more dramatic. Rodin stunned the world with a bevy of ecstatic entwined lovers and jubilant flying figures. Today, if Muerk is any measure, it's enough for a big lump of a man to sit in a corner and sulk.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery had for a number of years been planning the comprehensive exhibition "Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation." With the arrival the gallery's new director, Louis Grachos, it was decided that the work of the first great modern sculptor would be joined by a concurrent exhibition of contemporary figure sculpture, called "Bodily Space: New Obsessions in Figurative Sculpture."
With the twin exhibitions Rodin's "The Thinker" and Mueck's "Big Man" were within pouting distance of each other. "Rodin" and "Bodily Space" were installed in adjacent galleries, but close enough for a studied comparison. (Size-wise, "Big Man" had a huge advantage: he measures 81 inches high and is more than half that much in width; the Rodin is a 1903 reduction of the famous giant bronze, coming in at a little under 15 inches high.)
The Rodin show itself would be a monumental event and rare opportunity to see this pivotal sculptor in such a broad collection. It contained some 60 bronzes that cover the entire range of the sculptor's prodigious output, including some of his best-known and revered works.
In addition to "The Thinker" were such famous pieces as "The Kiss" and "Monumental Head of Balzac," along with various full-figure (literally) studies of the novelist both nude and in the controversial robed versions. "The Cathedral" is among the more gentle and lyrical of Rodin's many sculptures of isolated hands, of which five others are on view -- including "Large Clenched Left Hand" and its horror-movie contortions.
Joining these are good-sized maquettes for two of Rodin's most compelling public sculptures, "Burgers of Calais" and "Gates of Hell." The last work -- in its full-scale form cast after the artist's death -- is a 20-foot-high bronze door teaming with gyrating figures. Its complexity and ambition is such that it occupied Rodin for 20 years, and over that time the sculptor used it freely as a kind of changing storehouse for completely separate and independent sculptures.
Because Rodin barely ever left a figure alone once it was made, the question of the many posthumous cast sculptures in the Cantor collection -- some, major pieces commissioned by Cantor himself -- are less problematic than they might be in the case of, say, Degas. Degas never intended his wax sculptures to be cast; Rodin wanted his work broadly known to the public and cast it freely, making multiple castings from different plasters, increasing or reduceding the size of a work and even ordering certain marble pieces to be rendered in bronze. He left the casting process mostly to skilled artisans, although he would reject or revise when a piece didn't meet his standards.
But still, Rodin left more than 5,000 plasters and molds to the French state with unlimited reproduction rights. Generally, posthumous casts are considered legitimate by most scholars and curators, according to Kenneth Wayne, the gallery curator of modern art and organizer of the Buffalo presentation of the show. Wayne, a Rodin scholar himself, says the posthumous Cantor Collection Rodins were cast "in very close consultation with Professor Albert Elsen of Stanford University, who was the world's leading expert on Rodin and also on bronze casting and copyright issues."
In fact, he adds, Elsen wrote the College Art Association's guidelines on the ethics of bronze casting.
In the exhibition, the labels told the story. The reduced version of the emotion-charged "The Three Shades" (1904), for example, is a 1981 Musee Rodin cast of 10. "Romeo and Juliette" was cast sometime before Rodin's death in 1917. The date of the casting of the 1903 reduction of "The Thinker" is unknown. One of Rodin's earliest pieces, the 1863-4 "Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose," was most likely cast in the 1970s at the highly regarded Couberin Foundry.
The Albright-Knox collection aded to the multiple riches of this exhibition with their own life-size "Eve" and "Age of Bronze," both of which are represented in the Cantor collection by smaller versions. As Rodin's first full-sized figure to go on public display, "Age of Bronze" set off a roiling controversy in 1876. Critics, non-plused by the intense realism of the sculpture, accused Rodin of casting from life (tantamount to a crime in a day when the work of the unaided hand was the measure of an artist).
This event alone shows how radical Rodin's revision of sculpture was. The prevailing neoclassical styles of the day sought to make idealized figures a couple safe removes from the grittiness of real life. It was Rodin's role to smash these limited concepts and turn conventional ideas of what a sculpture could be on its head.
Wayne sees Rodin's role in moving sculpture into the 20th century as fundamental as that of Cezanne in painting. Wayne calls Rodin "'The Father of Modern sculpture' because he revolutionized sculpture in the late 19th century, (taking it) in entirely new directions."
Those new directions are what made Rodin so important to the modern sculptors who followed him. With Rodin, subject matter was no longer restricted to historical or religious themes. And his wide-ranging expressiveness showed that there was no need to confine the emotional range to conventional rigged-up standards. Rodin, though in many way still rooted in 19th century culture, heroically readied sculpture for the coming century of unfettered feelings and the anxiety that such high passion brings.
In his defense of "Age of Bronze," Rodin summed up his modern approach when he said that it depicted "a mind in transformation" rather than representing some kind of ideal harmonized state where humanity was in perfect tune with nature. The idea that some ambiguous in-between state could be depicted in sculpture was a very modern notion. It made his work critical to those young artists who were moving beyond realism into uncharted expressive territory.
Nowadays, with the figure again playing a major role in sculpture, Rodin's example has become paramount. He was the first sculptor to use the fragment or the incomplete figure with mismatched parts. He didn't fuss about "correct" proportions, surface finish or anatomical accuracy. Instead, he exaggerated to the point of distortion and left signs of imperfection in his casting. Emotionally, he pulled out all the stops.
For these reasons and more, "Bodily Space" provided endless insight into how contemporary sculptors are using (or abusing) Rodin's sculptural innovations roughly a century later. The show, curated by the gallery's Holly E. Hughes, ranged widely over contemporary figure sculpture. Included were Bruce Nauman, Janine Antoni (who recently had an installation in the Albright-Knox), Robert Gober, Tony Oursler, Mauizo Cattelan, Antony Gormley and Mueck, among others.
From Mueck to the "body part" sculpture of Gober to the slice-of-life realism of the late Duane Hanson, the entire concept of what makes a sculpture seem "real" is revamped. Gober's quirky leg ("Untitled," 1990), dressed in a real pant leg, sock and shoe, juts out from a baseboard in a bizarrely comic take on the old Rodin idea that the whole body can be suggested by a fragment. Hanson's fully clothed fiberglass figures in spookily natural pose are famous for fooling gallerygoers into thinking that they are in the presence of a living being. His "Security guard," 1990, had visitors momentarily thinking that they were coming upon over-casual attendants oddly armed with flashlights.
Oursler is at least a few light-years away from bronze sculpture. His usual schtick is to project videos of talking heads on unusual objects for an eerie 3-D effect. "Don't Look At Me," 1994, projects the video on an actual armchair and a simple cloth figure. Rodin would probably not be amused.
Video also turns up in the work of Nam June Paik, one of the pioneers in the sculptural use of video. Antoni, for her part, used a traditional sculptural form -- the bust -- but radically revises the material and technique. "Lick and Lather," 1993, features 14 busts, seven in chocolate and seven in soap. And, yes, she did lick the chocolate into shape and lather the soap to sculpt her forms.
The two exhibitions dramatically demonstrate how contemporary sculptors have responded to ideas that have been floating around ever since Rodin let them loose back in the late 1880s. Nowadays, no sculptor can make a serious heroic figure, and few are willing to pump up the emotions to such colossal levels as Rodin routinely did. We're living in an ironic age with a very different psychology stirring behind it.
"'Big Man,'" Lawrence writes, "is Rodin's 'Thinker' for our times..."
If this is true, we might want to worry. We like to think that Rodin's naked, hunched figure is puzzling over something big, like, say, Descartes' algebraic negative roots, or why Napoleon was always sticking his hand in his vest for those portraits.
The flabby giant fashioned by Mueck (rhymes with Buick), on the other hand, doesn't exactly convince as a solid representative of the thinking class. He just looks too petulant, too sulky, to have much going on behind his furrowed fiberglass brow.
What's extraordinary is that these two sculptures -- one created in 1890, the other in 2000 -- appeared in Buffalo that year in what might be called a meeting of the mismatched minds. If you compare Muerk's figure with Rodin's multi-figure work the contrasts are even more dramatic. Rodin stunned the world with a bevy of ecstatic entwined lovers and jubilant flying figures. Today, if Muerk is any measure, it's enough for a big lump of a man to sit in a corner and sulk.
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery had for a number of years been planning the comprehensive exhibition "Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession, Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation." With the arrival the gallery's new director, Louis Grachos, it was decided that the work of the first great modern sculptor would be joined by a concurrent exhibition of contemporary figure sculpture, called "Bodily Space: New Obsessions in Figurative Sculpture."
With the twin exhibitions Rodin's "The Thinker" and Mueck's "Big Man" were within pouting distance of each other. "Rodin" and "Bodily Space" were installed in adjacent galleries, but close enough for a studied comparison. (Size-wise, "Big Man" had a huge advantage: he measures 81 inches high and is more than half that much in width; the Rodin is a 1903 reduction of the famous giant bronze, coming in at a little under 15 inches high.)
The Rodin show itself would be a monumental event and rare opportunity to see this pivotal sculptor in such a broad collection. It contained some 60 bronzes that cover the entire range of the sculptor's prodigious output, including some of his best-known and revered works.
In addition to "The Thinker" were such famous pieces as "The Kiss" and "Monumental Head of Balzac," along with various full-figure (literally) studies of the novelist both nude and in the controversial robed versions. "The Cathedral" is among the more gentle and lyrical of Rodin's many sculptures of isolated hands, of which five others are on view -- including "Large Clenched Left Hand" and its horror-movie contortions.
Joining these are good-sized maquettes for two of Rodin's most compelling public sculptures, "Burgers of Calais" and "Gates of Hell." The last work -- in its full-scale form cast after the artist's death -- is a 20-foot-high bronze door teaming with gyrating figures. Its complexity and ambition is such that it occupied Rodin for 20 years, and over that time the sculptor used it freely as a kind of changing storehouse for completely separate and independent sculptures.
Because Rodin barely ever left a figure alone once it was made, the question of the many posthumous cast sculptures in the Cantor collection -- some, major pieces commissioned by Cantor himself -- are less problematic than they might be in the case of, say, Degas. Degas never intended his wax sculptures to be cast; Rodin wanted his work broadly known to the public and cast it freely, making multiple castings from different plasters, increasing or reduceding the size of a work and even ordering certain marble pieces to be rendered in bronze. He left the casting process mostly to skilled artisans, although he would reject or revise when a piece didn't meet his standards.
But still, Rodin left more than 5,000 plasters and molds to the French state with unlimited reproduction rights. Generally, posthumous casts are considered legitimate by most scholars and curators, according to Kenneth Wayne, the gallery curator of modern art and organizer of the Buffalo presentation of the show. Wayne, a Rodin scholar himself, says the posthumous Cantor Collection Rodins were cast "in very close consultation with Professor Albert Elsen of Stanford University, who was the world's leading expert on Rodin and also on bronze casting and copyright issues."
In fact, he adds, Elsen wrote the College Art Association's guidelines on the ethics of bronze casting.
In the exhibition, the labels told the story. The reduced version of the emotion-charged "The Three Shades" (1904), for example, is a 1981 Musee Rodin cast of 10. "Romeo and Juliette" was cast sometime before Rodin's death in 1917. The date of the casting of the 1903 reduction of "The Thinker" is unknown. One of Rodin's earliest pieces, the 1863-4 "Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose," was most likely cast in the 1970s at the highly regarded Couberin Foundry.
The Albright-Knox collection aded to the multiple riches of this exhibition with their own life-size "Eve" and "Age of Bronze," both of which are represented in the Cantor collection by smaller versions. As Rodin's first full-sized figure to go on public display, "Age of Bronze" set off a roiling controversy in 1876. Critics, non-plused by the intense realism of the sculpture, accused Rodin of casting from life (tantamount to a crime in a day when the work of the unaided hand was the measure of an artist).
This event alone shows how radical Rodin's revision of sculpture was. The prevailing neoclassical styles of the day sought to make idealized figures a couple safe removes from the grittiness of real life. It was Rodin's role to smash these limited concepts and turn conventional ideas of what a sculpture could be on its head.
Wayne sees Rodin's role in moving sculpture into the 20th century as fundamental as that of Cezanne in painting. Wayne calls Rodin "'The Father of Modern sculpture' because he revolutionized sculpture in the late 19th century, (taking it) in entirely new directions."
Those new directions are what made Rodin so important to the modern sculptors who followed him. With Rodin, subject matter was no longer restricted to historical or religious themes. And his wide-ranging expressiveness showed that there was no need to confine the emotional range to conventional rigged-up standards. Rodin, though in many way still rooted in 19th century culture, heroically readied sculpture for the coming century of unfettered feelings and the anxiety that such high passion brings.
In his defense of "Age of Bronze," Rodin summed up his modern approach when he said that it depicted "a mind in transformation" rather than representing some kind of ideal harmonized state where humanity was in perfect tune with nature. The idea that some ambiguous in-between state could be depicted in sculpture was a very modern notion. It made his work critical to those young artists who were moving beyond realism into uncharted expressive territory.
Nowadays, with the figure again playing a major role in sculpture, Rodin's example has become paramount. He was the first sculptor to use the fragment or the incomplete figure with mismatched parts. He didn't fuss about "correct" proportions, surface finish or anatomical accuracy. Instead, he exaggerated to the point of distortion and left signs of imperfection in his casting. Emotionally, he pulled out all the stops.
For these reasons and more, "Bodily Space" provided endless insight into how contemporary sculptors are using (or abusing) Rodin's sculptural innovations roughly a century later. The show, curated by the gallery's Holly E. Hughes, ranged widely over contemporary figure sculpture. Included were Bruce Nauman, Janine Antoni (who recently had an installation in the Albright-Knox), Robert Gober, Tony Oursler, Mauizo Cattelan, Antony Gormley and Mueck, among others.
From Mueck to the "body part" sculpture of Gober to the slice-of-life realism of the late Duane Hanson, the entire concept of what makes a sculpture seem "real" is revamped. Gober's quirky leg ("Untitled," 1990), dressed in a real pant leg, sock and shoe, juts out from a baseboard in a bizarrely comic take on the old Rodin idea that the whole body can be suggested by a fragment. Hanson's fully clothed fiberglass figures in spookily natural pose are famous for fooling gallerygoers into thinking that they are in the presence of a living being. His "Security guard," 1990, had visitors momentarily thinking that they were coming upon over-casual attendants oddly armed with flashlights.
Oursler is at least a few light-years away from bronze sculpture. His usual schtick is to project videos of talking heads on unusual objects for an eerie 3-D effect. "Don't Look At Me," 1994, projects the video on an actual armchair and a simple cloth figure. Rodin would probably not be amused.
Video also turns up in the work of Nam June Paik, one of the pioneers in the sculptural use of video. Antoni, for her part, used a traditional sculptural form -- the bust -- but radically revises the material and technique. "Lick and Lather," 1993, features 14 busts, seven in chocolate and seven in soap. And, yes, she did lick the chocolate into shape and lather the soap to sculpt her forms.
The two exhibitions dramatically demonstrate how contemporary sculptors have responded to ideas that have been floating around ever since Rodin let them loose back in the late 1880s. Nowadays, no sculptor can make a serious heroic figure, and few are willing to pump up the emotions to such colossal levels as Rodin routinely did. We're living in an ironic age with a very different psychology stirring behind it.
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