When Pablo Picasso started art in the late nineteenth century, Auguste Rodin was at the height of his fame. Both have created an extraordinary work in terms of their aftermath and production volume. In different epochs they find the way to new ways of representing the body, to a new figuration that seismographically captures something of the spirit of their time. Rodin, who was born in Paris in 1840, goes beyond realism and naturalism and seeks to express expressive emotion in the explicit materiality of his figures. He is the founder of modern plastic. Picasso was born in Málaga in 1881 and, with the Cubist Revolution, marks the beginning of a new chapter in modernism. There is no evidence that they ever met.Picasso stayed in Paris frequently from the turn of the century and in 1904 definitely took up a studio in the Bateau-Lavoir. Rodin dies in 1917.
When the Picasso and Rodin museums, with their rich holdings, come together for the first time to put these demiurgic modern artists into a dialogue in a double exhibition in both houses, then it will only be a matter of showing any borrowings to a limited extent.
Picasso studied Rodin's work very carefully and obviously admired it, while the sculptor did not notice the Spanish artist any further.
"My drawings are the key"
In 1900 Picasso came to Paris for the first time for the World's Fair. He visited the great Rodin exhibition in the Pavillon de l'Alma and five years later a retrospective of the sculptor in the Musée du Luxembourg. He pins a photograph of the “thinker” on his studio wall. When Picasso modeled his first small sculpture of a crouching, melancholy brooding woman in clay in 1902, he probably thought of Rodin. More than three decades later, a reclining, chin in hand, reading female figure in the painting “Big Bathers with a Book” shows an even clearer correspondence to Rodin's “Thinker”, even if it is stylistically completely different.
The two works are united in the majestic stairwell in the Picasso Museum and show two masters in the representation of physical expression and emotion. The expressiveness of Rodin's figures, their dramatic bodies with postures and facial expressions expressing suffering, sadness, happiness or ecstasy are closely observed by Picasso. Tragically empty eye sockets and mouths opened in a scream belonged to the canon of his experimentation in the early years, whether as drawings or in sculptures. The Spaniard must also have seen the steadfastly striding “L'homme qui marche” in the exhibition of 1900: he takes the same decisive step in a drawing.
With more than five hundred exhibits, the double exhibition provides an insight into their creative process in a permanent comparison of the two artists. The parallels that are worked out - one should start with a visit to the Picasso Museum - are fascinating to follow. Above all, the two artists illuminate each other in this confrontation and thus also the deeper understanding of their motivations and obsessions, which underlie such an overpowering need for design. You experience them in some rooms like at work, always drawing - “my drawings are the key to my work,” comments Rodin - always shaping, whereby Picasso's talent as a sculptor is equal to that of the painter. “Creating, improvising are useless words,” writes Rodin. It's about understanding.Picasso strives for such an “intelligent” painting that “it becomes like life”. In order to understand how the sought expression, the desired lively emotion can be represented in the matter or the painting, the studio is the place where experiments and experimental series are carried out.