[Essay] Rodin: Contemplation and Dreams

Each era seems to have its own proclaimed master sculptor, recognized as a master in  that artist’s own lifetime. Some names are more familiar than others — Polykleitos  (Classical Greece), Donatello (Early Renaissance), Michelangelo (High Renaissance),  Bernini (Baroque), and Canova (Ne0-Classical) to name a few — but all have captured the  minds, eyes, and hearts of generations of art lovers. For the late nineteenth century, on  the cusp of the abstractive trends of the twentieth, the celebrated master sculptor was  Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rodin’s sculptures not only revived for a new century  the expressive and naturalistic styles of antiquity, using ancient Greek sculptors’ medium  of choice, but also propelled figurative sculpture into the modern age with emotion and  pathos never seen before in the sculpted form. 

And now Rodin comes to Florida.  This Spring, the Polk Museum of Art at Florida  Southern College invites visitors into the world of the modern master with an astonishing  exhibition featuring more than forty bronze sculptures filling the Museum’s first floor  galleries. The largest exhibition of sculptures in the Museum’s history, Rodin:  Contemplation and Dreams takes its title from the sculptor’s own words; he described the  ability of art ideally to “open before us an enchanted land of contemplation and dreams”  — and, in his work, Rodin sought to transport and amaze his viewers.   

Rodin’s sculptures are instantly recognizable, with his Thinker and Gates of Hell emblems in the history of art. Forgoing idealization for astonishingly naturalistic  representation, Rodin created sculptures that connect with their viewers and speak to  the universal emotions and mentalities of the human experience. Tapping into the  deep roots of humanity, Rodin also imbues his figures with his personal touch,  presenting them in previously unseen (or even unwieldy) poses or making gestures  that appear shockingly un-staged and thus all the more human. Truly, often it is  difficult even to believe that his sculptures are merely bronze, so readily do they look  like they should come to life, weep, or speak. Indeed, Rodin’s sculptures draw their  power from physical and psychological truth, capturing human anguish, drama,  tragedy, mindfulness, and hope through the sculpted form.  

An artist of the Post-Impressionist era (roughly the last two decades of the nineteenth  century), Rodin is not easily categorized.  His focus on “real” human forms behaving in “real” human ways echoes the strengths of the French Realists and Impressionists, who  focused similarly on the world and people of the here and now — and how we actually see them.  Meanwhile, the unmitigated expressive emotion of Rodin’s figures, such that  they make viewers actually feel something themselves, recalls the expressionistic manners  of fellow Post-Impressionist-era artists including Vincent Van Gogh.  But, whereas those  artists are celebrated principally for their tw0-dimensional work, Rodin injects into the  arena of sculpture all the humanity and emotion of the real world with a touch and style  uniquely his own.

By by H. Alexander Rich, Ph.D., Executive Director and Chief Curator

Rodin: Contemplation and Dreams will be on view June 25 through October 30 , 2022 in Gallery I, Gallery II, and Perkins Gallery.