Rodin's Art Elsen, Albert E; Jamison, Rosalyn Frankel; Barryte, Bernard ...
2008
eBook
This reference/catalogue, written by the late Dr. Elsen, encompasses a lifetime's thoughts on Rodin's career, surveying the artist's accomplishments through the detailed discussion of each object in ...the collection. It begins with essays on the formation of the collection, the reception of Rodin's work, and his casting techniques. The entries that follow are arranged topically and include extensive discussions of Rodin's major projects.
In this paper, I analyze two poems from Rainer Maria Rilke's Neue Gedichte in which the act of seeing attains a poetic status, namely "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes" and "Pietà." This ocular poeticity ...derives not merely from the visual features of the beheld objects, but more fundamentally from the temporal implications of seeing. In the crucial scene of "Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes," an instance of third-person observation is recounted as narrative retrospection, while in "Pietà," a first-person observation is narrated in the moment as a subjective concatenation of temporal categories. These valences of the gaze are further traced in two artworks which are thought to have inspired the poems: a Roman bas-relief depicting Orpheus, Hermes, and Eurydice, and Auguste Rodin's Le Christ et la Madeleine. In the poems and their statuary antecedents, it is not what is seen but rather the temporal substrate of seeing that indexes the gaze as variedly poetic, and consequently as intrinsic to subjectivity.
In a 10 December 1892 article for the literary supplement of Le figaro, for example, journalist Léon Riotor excerpted some of Daudet's, Zola's, and Coppée's responses to a lengthy questionnaire ...devised by graduate student Georges Saint-Paul to measure his contemporaries' aptitude for "le langage intérieur" (interior language).10 Writers, scientists, and workers from France answered questions about auditory memory, verbal articulation, dreams and hallucinations, hereditary traits, and the perception of mental function (synthetic or analytical), among other things (fig. 2).11 The Figaro article, "Cerveaux littéraires: Saint-Paul's research was directed by Alexandre Lacassagne, the specialist of criminal anthropology, and was inspired by a nascent British movement that used surveys as psychological instruments.12 Saint-Paul's questionnaire appeared in Le figaro and Le journal, but also in more specialized outlets such as La revue scientifique (The Scientific Review).\n That Toulouse's planned studies of other writers and artists did not come to fruition may have been a product of the notoriety this inaugural volume generated.
THE equally powerful Niobide blessée (Wounded Niobid), cast in bronze in 1907, is the last work by Camille Claudel to survive. This biographical note comes from Ayral-Clause, who gives a blow-by-blow ...account of Camille's terrible final years, her existence slowly destroyed by paranoid delusions in which "Auguste Rodin and his 'gang'" loomed large. By 1913, the year her father died, Camille was 48 - not much older than Rodin when she met him - isolated behind closed shutters in her filthy atelier, scavenging for food in garbage cans, attacking with a hammer the sculptures she had made. Her mother, who never forgave the scandalous affair with Rodin, had cut Camille out of the family's life. Two days after Monsieur Claudel's funeral (Camille was not invited), Madame Claudel arranged for her daughter's forcible removal to an asylum, insisting she be fully sequestered from the outside world. When Camille's persecution mania subsided, the doctor suggested letting her out on a trial basis: "Madame Claudel immediately replied with a complete refusal," writes Ayral-Clause. A collection of Camille Claudel's sculptures is on display in a room at the Musée Rodin in Paris. I've not been there myself, but .when I emailed a friend and happened to mention the ballet, she replied: "I love Camille's work. I brought the kids to the Rodin Museum last summer and we visited the Camille section (it's like an annex; one can have a feminist reading of the Rodin Museum!). The work was absolutely superb, in every part as great as Rodin's. ... Wow, I would really like to see Les Grands Ballets' interpretation."
Modes of Contemplation Schoene, Dorothea
Afterimage,
03/2012, Letnik:
39, Številka:
5
Journal Article, Book Review
Recenzirano
While pairs of paintings are installed right next to each other, the curators have made the effort to build a visual axis separating them: either by installing them on opposite walls or, in the main ...hall of the exhibition, by hanging works of motion and acceleration on a curving wall while those of rest and calmness are placed in dark, quiet rooms and chambers. By the end, visitors will have encountered a multitude of themes engaging the dialectic relation of acceleration and deceleration - from the early fascination for industrialization and mechanization and the contemporary phenomena of media seduction to financial crises, environmental damages, and even pornography as a fast-paced, de-emotionalized type of sexuality.
Rethinking Rodin’s Thinker Vujanovic, Barbara
The journal of the Decorative Arts Society 1850--the Present,
01/2019
43
Journal Article
The Thinker, one of the most iconic sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), is celebrated for its unique harmony, potency of form, and for its complex symbolic narrative; it originated from the ...sculptor’s fascination with fragments. It is one of the numerous sculptures and reliefs that adorn the sculptor’s life work, The Gates of Hell. The Gates inscribe Rodin in the rich tradition of decorative portals, uniting both architectural and sculptural form and function, a tradition that can be traced from the periods of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisations through classical antiquity to the present.
Involvement with architectural and decorative sculpture marked the beginning of Rodin’s career, when he worked with several different decorative artists and ornamentalists, and when he was engaged in the decoration of several buildings in Paris and Brussels. The importance of this kind of artistic foundation was emphasised by Rodin, himself, who claimed in his later years: ‘I started as a craftsman, and then I became an artist. It’s the right one, the only method’. He also had experience as a ceramic decorator working for the Sèvres Porcelain Factory. This aspect of Rodin’s career and his interest in the decorative arts had a strong impact on his sculptural production, which is explained in the example of The Thinker and its complex history and meaning.
The Burghers of Calais (1895) by Auguste Rodin was originally commissioned by the city of Calais to celebrate a local hero. It then became part of the national culture of the Third Republic, and it ...can today be found all over the world. This article tells the story of how this statue came into being and also attempts to address the issue of why it has become so popular and why it seems to speak so directly to universalism. Apart from the fact that The Burghers of Calais is an extremely well executed and very inspired piece of art, this monument, I argue, also has to have another quality in order to become so popular. This quality, I suggest, is related to a new way of understanding and depicting heroism. Rodin centered The Burghers of Calais around a modern version of heroism that can be termed ‘civic heroism’, which draws on the collective and civic courage of the average person (Zivil-courage), rather than on the physical courage of the single and outstanding individual. Or, to put it differently, Rodin turned the statue into a democratic exemplum.
Oskar Kokoschka's turn-of-the-century play "Murderer the Women's Hope" (Vienna, 1907) and his illustrations are paradigmatic for a view of the human body shared by Surrealists and post-Surrealists in ...the Paris of the late 1920s which undercut the central perspective and narrative interpretation. The idealist vertical image of humanity, which culminates in the privileging of the head and the face as the site of human identity, is under attack. Such privileging of the vertical over the horizontal is a function of the subject-centeredness of Western cultural symbolism, which extends from sexual to political icons. The avant-garde responds by liquidating concepts and metaphors as mere conceptual grids and replaces them by the grafting on of an audiovisual tactile experience of the human being in its corporeal materiality. Kokoschka's iconoclasm is viewed as the inception of a series of experiments in decomposing the grid of this vertical zone. Its scope is inherently beyond a Freudian psychoanalytical model. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
Jorge Carrera Andrade, el pequeño que sigue con la mirada a la mariposa que revolotea, que observa con simpatia la paciencia del asno y la vida humilde de los insectos, hizo de su juventud una ...busqueda permanente de rumbos y formas de expresion que reflejaban muy prematuramente todo el potencial de su interior. DESGLOSEMOS LOS ELEMENTOS DE LA BELLEZA QUE JORGE CARRERA EMPLEA Las formas y los motivos: en su mundo lleno de formas encontramos algunas lineales como «la minima cinta métrica» del caracol, otras geométricas como el «ostion de dos tapas» como un cofre de calcio ? el «estuche amarillo» de la tortuga, también las hay que no son definidas como el «jeroglifico del cielo» que forma la gaviota y otras formas atractivas como las espirales de una «concha marina» ? la «nuez: ... cerebro de duende». Es aqui donde Jorge Carrera como observador desempeno un papel importante, pues nos entrego un sin fin de cuadros muy grandes o mas pequenos, sumamente belles, he aqui una composicion: «palmera, arquitectura a pulso de sol y viento» Asi, al colibri Io coloca como un prisma volador, como un bello retazo de arco iris junto a la arana obrera paciente y moderadora, y al ostion que es la inmovilidad misma de la indiferencia al lado del caracol, leccion timida del esfuerzo y de la marcha.
The riddle of our origins has inspired a number of visionary works of art, including interpretations as diverse as William Blake's illustration of the cosmological designer Urizen in The Ancient of ...Days (1794) and Auguste Rodin's marble sculpture of primordial man issuing from the outstretched palm of The Hand of God (1898). ... she includes no vanishing point; instead, all forms twist in an undifferentiated mass of competing actions.
