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Rodin's 'Magnificent Obsession' comes to Music City, USA |
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Possibly the greatest touring exhibit of France’s greatest sculpture, Rodin’s Magnificent Obsession is on its way to the Frist Museum in Nashville, starting Sept. 12 and running through Jan. 4. The collection is from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation and has been making its way around the United States for the last few years.
I haven’t seen this particular exhibition, but have had the pleasure to see much Rodin in my life – including at the Rodin Museum in Paris when I was a junior abroad at NYU – and I am particularly jealous of the cities that Magnificent Obsession travels through. Now it’s time for me to be jealous of Nashville, as if the city didn’t have enough with all that great American music and barbecue. Now it gets Rodin for four months.
The exhibition spans the length of Rodin’s illustrious career and features casts of many of his greatest works, including his iconic The Thinker and the profoundly moving The Kiss, one of the greatest sculptures ever created. There are still more great pieces from the master and from his greatest work, The Gates of Hell, and many of his salon successes.
For me personally, the appeal of Rodin has always been how the man straddled the pure idealism of the human form that defined French Classicism and the impending approach of Modernism, conveyed via elegantly sculpted forms merged with unfinished blocks of clay. His sculptures challenge the head and the heart and make for an exhilarating and exhausting study. If you can’t tell, I simply love the stuff.
In my opinion, there is only one sculptor of the late 1800s that can rival Rodin’s mastery of form - one that may have actually laid her hand to and created many of his works. That is one Camille Claudel, the great artist who started as an assistant to Rodin, became his lover and partner and ultimately succumbed to madness, driven by the public’s rejection of her work and Rodin’s rejection of her love and talent. She is, sadly enough, not part of this traveling exhibition, but I mention it because, during the year I spent in Paris, the Rodin Museum featured a side exhibition of her work and it was the single greatest sculpture exhibition I have ever seen. The memory is strongly with me to this day, as is the intensity of the emotions her amazing sculpture provoked in me.
All that aside, Rodin’s Magnificent Obsession delivers the greatness of the master and gives it good to Nashville starting next month. I have linked to an article here from Clarksville online, a Nashville Web site. It’s a well-written article with fine insight into Rodin’s work. Check it out.
-Noah Fleisher, Aug. 25, 2008
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