Rodin: the Flight of the Soul
“What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.”
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) represents the end of a sculptural tradition that goes back to Michelangelo, and ultimately to the ancient Greeks. Primarily a modeller, he completely revived sculpture from a period of relative stagnation and made it again a vehicle for intense personal expression, bringing a new and often erotic sensibility to bear on it.
Rodin sought to express, in an age not so dissimilar to our own, the anguish and ecstasy of the human soul as expressed through the movements of the human body—an ambition worthy of Michelangelo. In doing so he created an art that addresses itself directly to our own bodies and imaginations and created a challenge that was answered by many of the greatest painters and sculptors of modern times. This lecture will explore his work as a struggle between the immediacy of the physical and a deep yearning for spiritual resolution.
Michael Howard is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and teaches at the Manchester School of Art. He has published widely on European art of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, his books include: L. S. Lowry: A Visionary Artist; The Impressionists by Themselves; The Stations of the Cross / The Captive Figure and the award-winning dramatic interpretation and publication of material originally performed by the Zurich-based Dadaists of 1916. A New Order: An Evening at the Cabaret Voltaire. His book on Gauguin, was written in association with the Gauguin Museum, Tahiti, and his book on Monet for the Musée Marmottan, Paris.