Musée Rodin and its Five-Ringed Connections

My expectations were simple for a premier visit to Musée Rodin, one of Paris' main museums skipped during prior travels. 

What a treat! 

Nestled a couple of blocks from Invalides -- the 2024 Olympic archery venue -- and the Museum of the Army in the 7th Arrondissement, the museum of Auguste Rodin blends with its neighbors on the exterior while unveiling a grand garden and main building (the sculptor's later-years Hôtel Biron residence of about 116 years ago). 

Of course, the sculptures impress. It was fun, albeit unplanned, to view Rodin's sketches, ceramic models or miniatures for many of his famed works while discovering dozens of new-to-my-eyes concepts, then touring the museum gardens to find the magnificent, and at times monumental, Rodin casts in bronze. 

I knew not that one of his first major works, as a teen, featured a bust of his father, now on view with portraits or other portrayals of family members. 

There were also reminders of works seen at the largest U.S. museums dedicated to Rodin, including venues in Philadelphia, San Francisco, Kansas City and Atlanta's High Museum of Art, home to a gifted sculpture "The Shade" presented by the French Republic to the City of Atlanta as a memorial to arts patrons lost at Orly Field.

Speaking of "The Shade," it was new-to-me info there are multiple Rodin figures by this title, with trios of Shade figures in the galleries, garden and atop a massive portal the artist fashioned with additional accoutrement. 

There are nudes around many corners, including some not-for-kids poses like "Iris, Messenger of the Gods" (previously noted in this October 2022 post also summarizing Rodin past Olympic connections). 

Special for the 2024 Cultural Olympiad, Musée Rodin added content and works of Rodin's partner of 10 years, Camille Claudel, whose dramatic 1897 onyx and bronze work "The Wave" seemingly splashes/crashes from its display (the work is described as Claudel's major break from Rodin not long after she left him).

The best surprise was discovering several paintings by Rodin contemporaries, collected through friendship or investment. Most impressive: Large canvases by Edward Munch, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Vincent Van Gogh. 

Another discovery: Rodin's personal collection of hundreds of artifacts from ancient civilizations, with many figures of antiquity serving as inspiration for his own work. 

An upstairs corridor showcased a 2023 sculpture, apparently designed and assembled by 12 apprentice sculptors, titled "The Flame of Culture" inspired by the Olympic torch relay traditions. 

Exiting through the gift shop, two items caught my eye: a miniature version of "The Kiss" in its own wood crate (these miniatures were not available when this work was on view at the "Rings: Five Passions in World Art" exhibit of the 1996 Cultural Olympiad in Atlanta), as well as a clever pin design inspired by "The Thinker."

I was also captivated by a tin and brass broach pin design, described by the gift shop manager as "piano hands" (it was not clear if this is a Rodin work but likely is). For over 100 Euros, it was time to stop the music and settle with a few postcards. 

Methinks my wallet may be even emptier by Games end.

The Musee Rodin has special hours planned during Paris 2024 -- whether you're in town for the Olympics or a future City of Light excursion, do yourself a favor and make time to discover this Parisian treasure. 

Photos by Nicholas Wolaver

Rodin at the High = French Wissing in the USA

To wis is to know, and visitors to Atlanta's High Museum of Art may enjoy getting to know French sculptor Auguste Rodin through the fresh exhibition of 70 works in "Rodin in the United States: Confronting the Modern" on view through Jan. 15. 

When a banner for the exhibition recently went up locally, lyrics to Debbie Harry's seldom-heard passionate smooching song played in my head and inspired the rhyming headline to this post. 

In anticipation of the recent exhibition media preview, I dusted off memories of my first Rodin encounters, both in 1996, also at the High. 

Visiting the museum a week after moving to Georgia, the artist's solemn work "The Shade" -- the centerpiece of a memorial to 106 Atlantans lost in the Orly air disaster of 60 years ago -- greeted me on the approach to Richard Meier's award-winning building on Peachtree Street.

Later that year, of course, the exhibition "Rings: Five Passions in World Art" (photo below) was a cornerstone of the Cultural Olympiad in which Rodin's six-foot marble masterpiece "The Kiss" was a showstopping loan from the Rodin Museum in Paris. 

The new exhibition also features "The Kiss" though this time in bronze borrowed from the Baltimore Museum of Art, where I previously enjoyed this version during a New Jersey to Georgia road trip pit stop of summer 2018 (yes, I brake/break for museums). 

Here are five other Rodin works that caught my eye now on view at the High:

The marble "Christ and Mary Magdalene" -- for which Rodin supervised carving rather than himself chiseling, according to the exhibition wall text -- bookends silky smooth lines of the Biblical characters with rough, unfinished stone pockmarked by somewhat symmetrical knife-poked divots. Taking inspiration from the themes of Slow Art Day, I spent nearly 10 quiet minutes studying this work from all sides and it is extraordinary. This work is loaned by another Meier-designed masterpiece museum, The Getty in Los Angeles. 

"Female Torso with a Slavic Woman's Head" (photo below), which I vaguely recalled from an early 2000s Rodin exhibition at its Legion of Honor home in San Francisco, is an armless plaster figure whose downward gaze perhaps inspired Quintin Tarantino's French-Japanese character Sophie Fatale. As some may recall, she was the interpreter rolled down the snowy hill to a Tokyo emergency room in "Kill Bill: Vol. 1." But what woman will you see and be inspired to revisit via Rodin's work?

Speaking of Japan, for the drawing "Hanako" Rodin sketched his only Japanese model, a touring actress named Hisa Ota (or is it Ota Hisa?). I loved viewing the pen and ink later colored with crayon. While writing this post, a more detailed back story of the actress' intro to Rodin came to light via this site and their eventual artist:spouse:model collaboration is fascinating. 

According to wall texts, "The Prodigal Son" bronze (photo below) was cast for the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. This was another Legion of Honor work seen previously and it proved as moving now as ever. 

If this exhibition's iconic showpiece is "The Thinker" then its feminine counterpart conversation starter may be "Iris, Messenger of the Gods" on holiday from the Smithsonian/Hirshhorn Museum in D.C. Rodin left little to the imagination rendering the bronze "unexhibitable" for prudish American museums. The model was definitely more provocateur less demure.

The exhibition also includes an informative timeline for Rodin's career highs and lows, mistresses and marriage. 

I asked the guest curator, Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, the extent to which "The Kiss" loan of 1996 or the forthcoming Paris 2024 Cultural Olympiad were on her radar ("non" is her paraphrased response). 

She does have great expertise and information about Rodin to share, which may be viewed on YouTube via her summer presentation at the Clark Institute when the exhibition opened there. 

Photos by Nicholas Wolaver except the cover image of "Rings: Five Passions in World Art" catalog cover photo by Bruno Jaret.