‘Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece’ Review: Recasting History
At the British Museum, an exhibition juxtaposes the work of the French sculptor with selections from the Elgin Marbles.
‘In my spare time, I simply haunt the British Museum,” Auguste Rodin told an interviewer in 1903. The museum had the Elgin Marbles—more than half of the surviving statues and friezes designed by Phidias (c. 480-430 B.C.) for the Parthenon at Athens.
Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece
The British Museum
Through July 29
Through July 29
Rodin (1840-1917) was not so much haunted as captivated by Greece. Compelled to incorporate and extend its forms, he created a new genre, the partial figure, and adopted the fragment, archaeology’s gift to Modernism, as the expression of the complete work.
Brilliantly conceived, the British Museum’s new exhibition “Rodin and the Art of Ancient Greece” juxtaposes Rodin with his idol Phidias. More than 80 works in marble, plaster and bronze, many from the Musée Rodin in Paris, are presented alongside selections from the Elgin Marbles in the clear, albeit not Attic, light of the Sainsbury Exhibitions Gallery, whose end wall is a window.
Large plaster version of Rodin’s ‘The Kiss’ (after 1898) Photo: Musee Rodin
The rhythm of surface resemblance runs between the pairings, but it is the deep resonances and contrary pressures that make this exhibition so stunning. Cicero praised Phidias for summoning “a sort of extraordinary apparition of beauty” from his imagination (phantasia). Rodin sought “the entire truth, not only what is on the surface.” His sculptures are immersed in the fragmentary past, but their extraordinary beauty emerges as an intensely present reality.
The nude male in Rodin’s “The Age of Bronze” (1877) raises an arm like the tensely posed unmounted youth who prepares for the cavalcade on the north frieze of the Parthenon. The posture also invokes Michelangelo’s “The Dying Slave” (1513-16), and the Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer) of Polykleitos (440-430 B.C.). Instead of replicating Polykleitos’ arithmetical perfection and Phidias’ impersonal muscularity, Rodin presents a nervous, boyish figure.
Auguste Rodin’s ‘The Walking Man’ (1907); sand cast by Alexis Rudier 1913 Photo: Musee Rodin
“The Kiss” is a modern archetype, so we easily forget that the lovers are the adulterers Paolo and Francesca from Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” and that Giancotto, his brother and her husband, is about to discover and kill them. Pairing a large plaster version of “The Kiss” (after 1898) with two diaphanously draped goddesses from the Parthenon’s East Pediment emphasizes the erotic flow of drapery and flesh-like marble between the goddesses.
Rodin obscures his mortal’s faces; Phidias’ goddesses have lost their heads which, judging from surviving pedimental heads, would have been impassive. The body must talk, and the conversation runs between the pairings. Unfinished patches behind the goddesses are echoed by the all’antica roughness of the lovers’ seat. The crack where a goddess’s arm has broken is doubled by the crevice in Paolo’s back muscles. The goddesses have never seemed so three-dimensional, or so intimately alive.
The Parthenon sculptures were made as architectural ornaments, but dismantled as art objects. A similar fate befell “The Gates of Hell,” commissioned by the French state in 1880 for a decorative-arts museum in Paris that failed to materialize. Over the next decades, the figures climbed down as independent works, resonant with living myth.
Rodin in his Museum of Antiquities at Meudon on the outskirts of Paris (c. 1910) Photo: Musee Rodin
The river god Ilissos, who once reclined on the West Pediment of the Parthenon, undulates next to “The Earth” (1896), in which Gaia strains against formlessness as though aspiring to pedimental perfection, and “Ariadne” (1905), who began as “Recumbent Woman” in “The Gates of Hell,” before being renamed after the “Sleeping Ariadne” in the Vatican. Time has exposed the hidden plane that predestined Ilissos to emerge from his marble block, a rippled striation that runs diagonally across his back from his left shoulder, and then down his right thigh. Rodin builds the same plane with Ariadne’s sinews.
The Victorian Neo-Hellenists, too late for Byronism and too early for Hollywood, aimed for perfection. Rodin saw the Marbles as they were: damaged and cryptic, defaced by the hammers of Christian zealots and dilapidated by Turkish gunpowder. Then and later, Athenian life was an agōn, a contest of forces.
Bibi, the Parisian laborer who modeled for “Man With the Broken Nose,” resembles a Silenus or a Sophocles. He is not drunk on wine or language, but dazed by a blow from a shovel. We see the modern agōn in the broken planes of his face. He was denied entry to the Salon of 1865 (though he gained admittance in 1875).
With similar fluidity, Rodin invents the “Sister of Icarus” (1894-96), raises a naked dancer to the pantheon as “Iris, Messenger of the Gods” (1895), and combines fragments into “The Centauress” (1903-04). Her exaggerated stretch anticipates further modern dislocations. Before T.S. Eliot’s “heap of broken images,” Rodin was exploiting his “mutilated gods” as the material of new composites.
This is the first time that the British Museum has mixed Phidias’ Marbles with the work of another artist. Few could endure the contest. And Rodin, who never visited the Acropolis, might have appreciated this exhibition’s implicit argument for retaining the Elgin Marbles in so illuminating a spiritual exile: that the Rodin pairings put them into dialogue with the history of sculpture, rather than the myths of Athens. “What perfect unity there is in this fragment,” he marveled. “Is not the entire Acropolis here?”
—Mr. Green is a historian and critic in Boston.
