rodin - Royal Academy of Arts

20
Cat. 205
Muse, also called Meditation and The Inner
Voice, 1896
Bronze
144.5 x 75 x 54 cm
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, A36-1914. Rodin
Donation, 1914
Photo © V&A Images/V&A Museum
‘The way in which the artist
arrives at his goal is the secret of
his own existence. It is the
measure of his own vision ….
He exaggerates or deforms the
literal in sculpture … He
suppresses or diminishes one
part; and yet the whole is true
because he seeks only truth.’
RODIN, 1906
as though the whole central part of the body absorbs and protects the
contemplation implicit in the face, which might otherwise have been
dissipated by the presence of those parts that he has removed.
Rodin has left the casting seams from the piece mould on the figure. Do
they help us to feel the curvatures of the different volumes?
Should we be disturbed by the anatomically impossible position of the
head?
CONCLUSION
Rodin was a giant of the nineteenth century steeped in many of its
Romantic and literary ideals, yet at the same time he had taken
sculpture from being, in academic terms,‘a selective imitation of nature’
to, in his own words, the art of the ‘hole and the lump’. Rodin had
explored the emotional, expressive potential of the human head and
figure as far as it could go, and we may find that the rhetorical,
clamorous aspect of his work tips into an exaggerated pathos, or that
the erotic slides into the sentimental. Sculptors escaping his shadow
retreated into a calmer, more timeless serenity. Nevertheless, the
revelation of his partial figures and the extraordinary range of his
creative invention would live on long into the twentieth century.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Rodin, exh. cat., Catherine Lampert, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain,
Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2006
Rodin Rediscovered, exh. cat., Albert Elsen (ed.), National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C., 1981
CATHERINE LAMPERT, Rodin: Sculpture and Drawings, London, 1986
ALBERT E. ELSEN, Rodin’s Art, Oxford, 2003