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Versus Rodin: Bodies Across Space and Time

We may ask why this exhibition is called “versus” Rodin, but first: how did Adelaide get such a great collection?

Versus Rodin: Bodies Across Space and Time at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.
Versus Rodin: Bodies Across Space and Time at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide.

We may well ask why this exhibition is called “versus” Rodin — and we will — but first we need to ask how it is that Adelaide happens to have such a remarkable collection of works, no fewer than 20, by the great French sculptor who was perhaps the most important exponent of his art at the end of the 19th century. And the answer is that they were the gift of a remarkable collector and benefactor, William Bowmore (1909-2008).

Bowmore was born at Dalby on the Darling Downs in Queensland, but his name was originally Milhelm Braheim ibn Yared: his parents were Lebanese, Antiochian Orthodox Christians who had fled earlier episodes of Islamic intolerance. He finished school at St Joseph’s in Sydney and excelled at the piano and cello; apparently his English surname was inspired by his passion for the latter instrument.

Bowmore eventually made a fortune in private hospitals and spent his money amassing a considerable collection of art, at one stage amounting to 800 pieces, including paintings, sculptures, ceramics and antiquities, many of which he subsequently gave to museums. The present exhibition includes not only the 20 Rodin sculptures but also two fine antique statues: a headless figure of Artemis and a sensitive figure of a young athlete, both works of the Roman period.

Pierre de Wissant, monumental nude, c1886–87 by Auguste Rodin. Art Gallery of South Australia.
Pierre de Wissant, monumental nude, c1886–87 by Auguste Rodin. Art Gallery of South Australia.

The Rodin sculptures form the core of the exhibition, although they are scattered through its various rooms. They remind us not only what a remarkable artist he was but also that, although recognised as a colossus in his lifetime, he did not quite fit into the culture of contemporary France. Someone such as his older contemporary Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-75), also a brilliant artist but ultimately less original than Rodin, was better adapted to the decorative and rhetorical requirements of the Second Empire and the Third Republic. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) was deeply ambitious as an artist, and his first great work was a direct emulation of the great sculptures of antiquity.

The figure that we know as the Doryphoros was discovered at the end of the 18th century, perhaps in Pompeii, and its most famous version is in the Archeological Museum in Naples. It was only in 1863, however, that a contemporary scholar, working on matching extant sculptures and ancient literary references, realised that this was the celebrated Canon of Polycleitus, which the fifth-century master had designed as an exemplar of his system of human proportions.

Instantly the previously little-known sculpture became one of the most famous in a corpus of antique work that had been revolutionised since the arrival of the Elgin marbles in London a half-century earlier. Modern sculptors set themselves to attempt contemporary equivalents. Rodin made The Age of Bronze in 1876, and Adolf von Hildebrand carved his marble Young Man Standing in 1881-84 — incidentally setting standards for the two directions of subsequent modern sculpture: modelling and casting on the one hand, and direct carving on the other.

The Age of Bronze seemed so realistic and full of spontaneous life that Rodin was accused of having taken a cast from a real body; the artist was deeply affronted and thereafter tended to work on a larger scale than life.

His work, however, could have been even more controversial had he exhibited it under its original title Le Vaincu — the conquered one — which inevitably would have seemed a reference to France’s humiliating defeat by the Germans in 1870-71. At any rate, unlike the work produced in the same period by the impressionists and their successors, which largely seems to ignore the turbulent political events of the time, Rodin’s is marked by a combination of anguish and energy.

Silted Brow, 2016, by Alison Saar. Courtesy of LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California.
Silted Brow, 2016, by Alison Saar. Courtesy of LA Louver Gallery, Venice, California.

Among the works in the exhibition, a great torso from The Walking Man (1877-78) and several works from the Bourgeois of Calais group (1889) — including full-scale versions of individual figures — testify to Rodin’s attempts to create a new kind of heroic and tragic image of man in the modern world. There are two studies as well for the famous Monument to Balzac (1892-97), commissioned by the Societe des Gens de Lettres in 1891 but rejected and erected on the Boulevard du Montparnasse only in July 1939.

Rodin’s most ambitious project was to remain unfinished: the Gates of Hell, individual parts of which are among his most famous works today, particularly The Kiss and The Thinker. The scheme was inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, the greatest literary work of the Middle Ages, which had been virtually unknown outside Italy before the end of the 18th century but then had been rediscovered by the romantics and remained one of the most important inspirations of modernist artists and writers up to TS Eliot and beyond.

The paradox, however, was that Dante inspired artists and writers when the faith that had been unquestionable for him was increasingly succumbing to doubt. What to the poet had been a magnificent and coherent metaphysical and moral architecture was rediscovered as a wealth of tragic or pathetic episodes that seemed to evoke the alienation of modern life; in such an environment the Gates could never come together as a complete project with a coher­ent program but almost inevitably ended up as a collection of brilliant fragments.

In the exhibition, the gallery’s holdings of Rodin works are distributed through several rooms and surrounded by other things, but this is where we return to the ambiguity of the curious preposition versus. The word implies rivalry or opposition, but there is no clear sense that the works are setting themselves in any such relation to the Rodin collection. Indeed, there is little sense that many of the works have been chosen with Rodin in mind at all.

It would have been useful to put together a tightly focused show of Australian or even international sculptors who responded to Rodin’s heroic example by imitating him or by deliberately turning in other directions, towards carving or later construction, for example. There would be no shortage of interesting comparisons to make, even in Australia, with individuals such as Bertram Mackennal (1863-1931), George Lambert (1873-1930) or Rayner Hoff (1894-1937), recently the subject of a fascinating but unfortunately brief exhibition at the National Art School in Sydney, coinciding with the launch of Deborah Beck’s fine biography of the artist.

But here there is so little connection that one wonders how many of the artists selected have even given Rodin any serious thought. The clue to what has gone wrong is to be found in the various room labels, which are all about the body in various guises. It is as though we have been lured into the exhibition by the attraction of a great name but then, by a sleight of hand, Rodin has been replaced by the “the body”, and that leads straight to the familiar jumble of contemporary exhibitions.

The show’s subtitle, Bodies Across Space and Time, gives an idea of the lack of focus we can expect. In the cur­ator’s essay the Rodin works are characterised, in a nice example of mixed metaphor, as “anchors around which to pivot the more than 200 works”, and we are assured the result is “a series of achronic duets or polemic duels that span geography, forms and gender”. The curatorial structure, as is apparent from this passage, is so intellectually vague that almost nothing can be excluded as irrelevant, and consequently nothing can be truly relevant either.

In the absence of any coherent perspective, therefore, one is left to make what one can of individual pieces. Of these, perhaps the silliest is Xu Zhan’s cast of the east pediment sculptures from the Parthenon, today in the British Museum, to the necks of which he has attached upside-down casts of old Chinese Buddhist sculptures. The work was seen in the 20th Sydney Biennale last year and remains a flagrant example of the mismatch between the enormous resources employed and the poverty of the resulting meaning.

There are better things, but the trouble with a bad exhibition is that it detracts from individual works and makes even the inherently substantial seem disoriented or pointless. William Kentridge, for example, is an artist of substance, but his work seems to have no rhyme or reason in this context. Works that otherwise might intrigue us, such as a figure by Alison Saar or a painted study by Eugene Carriere are lost in the cacophony.

The first room is rather more effective than the others, with a fine photograph by Bill Henson of a naked youth standing in a natural setting. It has little to do with Rodin but it speaks in an interesting way to a late classical figure of an athlete, also a gift of Bowmore. The sculpture, under life-size, is one of many such figures produced in the Roman period, but an appealing one, made all the more interesting by dramatic lighting that also lends it a certain affin­ity with Henson’s tene­brist compositions.

Another photograph nearby, by Kehinde Wiley, is of a figure reclining with his arm hanging down, and coincidentally recalls — albeit with less mystery — the same pose mentioned here a couple of weeks ago in discussing the Henson exhibition at Melbourne’s National Gallery of Victoria. The pose goes back, as already mentioned, to an ancient relief but Wiley takes his composition most directly from one of the many works that it inspired, JB Restout’s Sleep (1771), which predated Jacques-Louis Dav­id’s more rigorous use of the motif in The Death of Marat by more than 20 years.

There other interesting things, as mentioned, including prints from Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War, photographs by Max Dupain, video works by Bill Viola, sculptures by Guy Maestri and Mike Parr’s etched self-portraits — the last two of which speak to each other in an interesting way — but on the whole they are isolated among too much that is unremarkable and, worst of all, disparate.

Curatorial essays, in the opulently produced catalogue, attempt to weave justifications for the confusion but in vain because works have their own meanings, which are more solid and even stubborn than those of words. Almost all of contemporary curatorship is based on the unspoken premise that things can mean whatever the curator or their copywriters assert. And this is because this school of curatorship is bred in an intellectual environment of endlessly recycled verbiage; it has little affinity for the pre-verbal, embodied, concrete yet intuitive thinking that is proper to art.

In reality words can neither add to nor alter the intrinsic meaning of works of art; that is why generations of writers and critics comment on the great works of the past, read and interpret and explicate, only to be succeeded by new commentators. Yet their efforts are not entirely futile, as long as they seek to reveal rather than to justify, to enlighten and not to construct mystifications.

Versus Rodin: Bodies Across Space and Time, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide. Until July 2

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Original URL: https://www.theaustralian.com.au/arts/review/versus-rodin-bodies-across-space-and-time/news-story/1e864f647db3be732a19a8bcfb9d34f0