Modern Sculpture—Rodin and Brancusi ........................................

Lecture 47

Today we’re going to talk about modern sculpture, or at least a few

modern sculptors, but it means backing up into the 19th century, to

begin with Auguste Rodin, who was born in 1840 and died in 1917.

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his lecture is also devoted to the sculpture of Constantin Brancusi
and Naum Gabo. In these sculptors, we see three possibilities
offered to artists in the 20th century: Expressionism, Idealism, and
Constructivism. We also see the beginnings of the rapid spread of modern art
from its center in Paris across Europe.

Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) began work as a stone mason and traveled to
Brussels in 1871 to work on decorative sculpture for the new Stock Exchange.
A lifelong study of Michelangelo combined with his love of French history
and literature to give him the desire and the ideas to produce some of the
most famous works in French sculpture. When Rodin died, his fame was at
its height, but the world had changed. In art, the late Romantic Expressionism
personi¿ ed in sculpture by Rodin gave way to Modernism. We should not
forget, however, that Rodin offered one of the major alternatives for modern
sculpture, because his Expressive style was never abandoned, even when the
Idealism of Brancusi (and Mondrian in painting) with its pure, svelte, pared-
down minimalism, was most inÀ uential.

We see ¿ rst Rodin’s Man with a Broken Nose (1863–1864), a probable
homage to Michelangelo, whose work was a continual inspiration to Rodin.
Note the expressive modeling. Rodin began with a complete understanding
of anatomy, of the structure beneath the skin, then altered it for his own
expressive reasons.

In 1875, Rodin went to Italy and, soon after his return, began work on
The Age of Bronze (1877). The piece is striking in its precise Naturalism;
indeed, one critic accused the artist of having made a cast from the model’s
body. Rodin was furious and never again made a life-size ¿ gure—his later
¿ gures were larger than life size or considerably smaller. The pose derives