Versions of many of Rodin’s masterpieces–including his iconic “The Thinker”–are on view in “Rodin: Transforming Sculpture” at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. (May 14 to Sept. 5, 2016), but somehow their wattage is dimmed in this presentation.
The exhibition fascinatingly reveals the working methods of the dazzling French artist who transformed Western sculpture at the end of the 19th century. Displays show how he formulated ideas in plaster and then realized them as cast bronzes or dazzlingly carved marbles. Often his romantic couples, saints and symbolic figures seem to be missing pieces, or to be just emerging from the material, evoking the broken classical Greek and Roman sculptures unearthed around Europe.
Rodin took the decadent realist sexuality of the late French Academy and made it more casual, more intimate, more sensual, more seemingly real. The results were often sculptures that take your breath away with their frank, sexy presence.
That comes across one by one here, but becomes fuzzy in the sum of the parts. The problem is the museum’s presentation. The exhibit goes for displays that suggest artist workshop tables and shelves, with lots of clear boxes set on top to guard the artwork. Loose fabric is draped as backgrounds or dividers. At times it works–or almost works–particularly in the first couple galleries. But it comes to feels contrived, though not theatrical enough to transport us past the contrivance. So the display becomes a distraction, rather than helping us get lost in Rodin’s magic.
Copyright Greg Cook. Pictured at top: Rodin’s “Galatea Cut Off at the Thighs in a Cup,” plaster, 1905. (Greg Cook)
