[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.