Métamorphoses

Dans l'atelier de Rodin

Here is a fresh look at August Rodin, one of the greatest sculptors of all time, thanks not only to his ability to capture the emotional and psychological complexity of human beings, but also his having profoundly renewed the very language of sculpture.

Rodin’s unprecedented passion for the act of creation, rather than completion, changed the way the world thinks about sculpture. The ongoing interplay of accidents and chance in his work, his figures fragmented only to be reconstituted through his ingenious ‘cobbling together’, enabled him to interpolate his work in an endless flow of creation. The topic of metamorphosis is directly related to his work, without model or witness, in the privacy of his studio. Fragile plasters as well as bronzes, marble figures, drawings, watercolours, and photographs all attest to this creative ferment. But ‘studio’ must also be understood as the small art community that worked for and around the Master. It consisted of practitioners of specific trades to whom we owe the transformation of one material to another, one dimension to another, under his attentive guidance.

This catalogue sheds light on the various processes of reprise and transformation, and takes stock of the sculptor’s prodigious creativity. It also features masterpieces like the two hundred or so figures fleeing The Gates of Hell – a work Rodin was to draw from for the rest of his career – and his celebrated Walking Man.

Nathalie Bondil is director and chief curator at the Montreal Museum of Fine arts.
Sophie Biass-Fabiani is heritage curator at the Musée Rodin, Paris.