Exhibition: "Picasso-Rodin", inventive artists freed from conventions
Audio 02:30
Poster of the “Picasso-Rodin” exhibition, until January 2, 2022 in Paris.
© RMN-Grand Palais, Adrien Didierjean, Succession Picasso 2021 / Rodin Museum, ph.
Herve Lewandowski
By: Muriel Maalouf
6 mins
The Picasso and Rodin museums in Paris unite their collections mainly to confront these two giants of art in their two spaces.
Publicity
The Door to Hell
by Auguste Rodin after Dante faces
Pablo Picasso's
Guernica
represented by a tapestry.
The Thinker
by Rodin and
La Baigneuse
by Picasso take the same pose ...
The exhibition brings together more than 500 pieces
by the two artists: sculptures, paintings, drawings, photos and attempts to show the common points between the two geniuses.
And yet they would not have met.
We only know that Picasso was interested in the works of Rodin and in particular in his monumental sculptures by Balzac.
Véronique Mattiussi, co-curator of the exhibition recounts: “
Picasso, when he arrives in Paris, looks at Rodin and in particular here we have an enlargement of a photograph of his studio where Picasso hangs a photograph of the
Thinker
cut out from a Spanish newspaper
Pèl y Ploma, ”she said. Then she adds: “
Picasso, that's what interests him. What Rodin succeeded in doing by breaking free from the codes of classical reproduction, Rodin delivers a very modern, unexpected portrait of Balzac. It will really mark him since we can see the traces of this figure of Balzac in his illustrative work of
Père Goriot
and the
Unknown Masterpiece ”, explains the co-curator of the exhibition.
The human body as a material for experimentation
What the exhibition also shows is how much the two artists constantly experiment in their workshops with the human body as a material that they deconstruct at will.
They also do not hesitate to assemble existing objects and materials.
They both assume the artisanal part in their artistic work, such
as Rodin's
sculpture of
Polyphene
emerging from a raw mass or
Picasso's seated
Pierrot
whose face takes up a mask sculpted by the artist in sheet metal.
They stand out, however, by a more jubilant relationship to the body with Rodin as in the sculpture of the
Kiss
where the embrace is all round and harmonious while with Picasso it is more tortured.
In his
Kiss
the couple seem to be engaged in a fight.
“
It's a sculpture on one side, a painting on the other.
Rodin is interested, through his figure of the
Kiss,
in the characters in their entirety, in feet, and on the other side, Picasso concentrates on the two faces.
However, the conclusion is quite common: they are two works of a perfect balance or we finally arrive at the lips of the two protagonists who unite.
And the whole work is ultimately just a kiss.
"
In short, two inventive artists who easily break free from conventions.
Picasso-Rodin
, a major exhibition in this recovery.
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