Monument à Balzac, 1898
Auguste Rodin
Plaster
Rodin depicts the celebrated writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrapped only in his dressing gown (his preferred garb for working), his arms folded beneath the fabric, and his head lifted. Deep hollows for his eyes suggest the inward gaze of his imagination. An attempt to give sculptural expression to a great creative force rather than a likeness, the work was rejected by the literary society that commissioned it. This is the full-scale plaster Rodin worked on before it was cut into three pieces for casting in bronze.*
From the exhibition
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art
(March – August 2023)
Explore a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
The decades between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation.
The exhibition celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and follows the influences they had on younger generations of French artists, on their peers and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.
With nearly a hundred works by artists ranging from Klimt and Munch, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian and Kandinsky complemented by a selection of sculpture by artists including Rodin and Camille Claudel, the exhibition follows the creation of a new, modern art, free of convention, taking in Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction.
[*National Gallery]
Taken in the National Gallery
Monument à Balzac, 1898
Auguste Rodin
Plaster
Rodin depicts the celebrated writer Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850) wrapped only in his dressing gown (his preferred garb for working), his arms folded beneath the fabric, and his head lifted. Deep hollows for his eyes suggest the inward gaze of his imagination. An attempt to give sculptural expression to a great creative force rather than a likeness, the work was rejected by the literary society that commissioned it. This is the full-scale plaster Rodin worked on before it was cut into three pieces for casting in bronze.*
From the exhibition
After Impressionism: Inventing Modern Art
(March – August 2023)
Explore a period of great upheaval when artists broke with established tradition and laid the foundations for the art of the 20th and the 21st centuries.
The decades between 1880 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 were a complex, vibrant period of artistic questioning, searching, risk-taking and innovation.
The exhibition celebrates the achievements of three giants of the era: Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin and follows the influences they had on younger generations of French artists, on their peers and on wider circles of artists across Europe in Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels and Vienna.
With nearly a hundred works by artists ranging from Klimt and Munch, Matisse and Picasso to Mondrian and Kandinsky complemented by a selection of sculpture by artists including Rodin and Camille Claudel, the exhibition follows the creation of a new, modern art, free of convention, taking in Expressionism, Cubism and Abstraction.
[*National Gallery]
Taken in the National Gallery