The Collection of Sculptures by Auguste RodinMetropolitan Museum of Art, 1913 - 44 pages |
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academic art accusations acquired admirable arms Auguste Rodin Baiser baked clay Barye Bather beauty book on Rodin Bronze statue bronze statuette bust of Dalou bust of Madame Camille Mauclair Carrier-Belleuse Caryatid COLLECTION OF SCULPTURES École EDINBURGH REVIEW essentially French sculptor exhibited in 1902 exhibited in bronze exhibited in plaster exquisite Figure Study FRENCH CRITICS Gate of Hell genius Gens de Lettres hand human Jean Baptiste Jules Dalou L'homme au nez living Louisiana Purchase Exposition Louvre Luxembourg Madame X marble and bronze Michelangelo monument Museum's collection nez cassé nude girl seated Old Courtesan original plaster original study Paolo et Francesca Paris plaster cast Plaster study portrait bust Puvis de Chavannes Pygmalion and Galatea realist recent accessions Rodin exhibited Rogers Fund Rude's Départ Ryan Gift Salon sculp SCULPTURES BY AUGUSTE Société des Gens statue of Balzac study in baked Tempest Thinker Thomas F Triton and Nereid Turquet Victor Hugo WILLIAM ROTHENSTEIN woman
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Page 33 - Rude and Barye. The desires, the ambitions, the questionings and searchings for a nobler, more true and living art, which were at once the glory and the torment of the leaders of Romanticism in letters and painting, haunted these three great sculptors likewise — the first two brought up in the strictest sect of artistic Pharisees — for both came under Louis David's personal influence. Out of the heart, therefore, of the classic school came these pioneers, who swept away the deadening, cramping...
Page 44 - ... of his great atelier, a much-prized collection of precious fragments of the antique testifies to his intense love for the art of Greece and Rome. And when accused of ' inventing ' new methods, he replies, ' I invent ' nothing ; I rediscover. I do not imitate the Greeks ; I try ' to put myself in the spiritual state of men who have left us the ' antique statues. The
Page 32 - ... national genius, naturally warm, generous and fearless, by the dominating pedagogy of Louis David's false ideal of classic beauty, aided and abetted by the seductive Canova's Italian influence. While these so-called classic 'tendencies were further fostered by the architect Percier's neo-Pompeian tastes. We have but to glance at early nineteenth-century sculpture in the Louvre to recognise the results of these influences on every side. Some artists show much grace. All show singular facility....
Page 35 - L'homme au nez casse,' was refused at the Salon. Three times he endeavoured to enter the Ecole des Beaux Arts — for he was fully alive to the admirable teaching and the many advantages he would have received there — and three times he was refused admission. Disgusted by the third refusal, his natural independence of character made him determine to renounce all further endeavours and to work out a career for himself. He therefore took a commission in Brussels which Carrier-Belleuse, then at the...
Page 42 - We now reach a work which aroused a storm that is not yet calmed. The Societe des Gens de Lettres had given Rodin a commission for a statue of 'Balzac.' In 1895 he had made studies for it in the nude, using daguerreotypes and a well-known portrait of Balzac, 'in his shirt-sleeves 'with one brace and folded arms,
Page 30 - ... Baptiste' in 1880, because he had represented him in the act of walking. Why not, we ask? Did the great ascetic, the great forerunner, sit still on a rock, staff in hand and forefinger uplifted in admonition, waiting for the world to come and listen to his message? Did he not wander to and fro, ' the voice of one crying in the wilderness' to the children of men, 'Repent ye, for the kingdom of 'heaven is at hand'?
Page 34 - In this little school he learned the elements of drawing and modelling, and, as already mentioned, he attended Barye's classes twice a week in the Jardin des Plantes. His life from fourteen to seventeen was a strenuous one. At 6 AM he was drawing the animals, then copying anatomical *' Auguste Rodin,' by Camille Mauclair, pi studies in the Museum.
Page 32 - Besides Coustou's restive, plunging 'Chevaux de Marly/ Robert Le Lorrain in his 'Chevaux du Soleil a 1'Abreuvoir' on the Hotel de Rohan, a work of remarkable verve and vigour, displayed a novel sentiment full of free, spirited and living execution quite outside the pseudo-classic lines. Pigalle...
Page 43 - ... neo-Greek school, his profound reverence and admiration for the antique, for pure Greek art, is unbounded. In his home at Meudon, under the peristyle of his great atelier, a much-prized collection of precious fragments of the antique testifies to his intense love for the art of Greece and Rome.
Page 32 - Talonnieres.' While in the extraordinary 'Voltaire nu' of the Institute and the fine nude figure of ' Commerce' at the base of the Louis XV monument at Rheims — a countryman, gravely contemplative, sitting on a sack of corn, the wolf and lamb lying together at his feet — we easily recognize a close relationship with much of Rodin's work. Still closer is this affinity, given the difference of period, in Houdon's famous 'Voltaire assis...