Auguste Rodin and Pablo Picasso opened the doors of modernity And although there is no certainty that they would ever meet, both geniuses shared the ambition to revolutionize art through constant experimentation, work “addiction” and prolific creation, according to an exhibition in Paris.
For the first time, two Parisian museums dedicated to Rodin (1840-1917) and Picasso (1881-1973) confront the work of these two artists who were separated by more than two generations. The first was already 60 years old when the young Spaniard arrived in Paris in 1900 and discovered one of Rodin’s most famous works, Monument to Balzac.
While critics scoffed at this massive bronze figure by comparing it to a seal, Picasso, standing in front of it in a show on the sidelines of the World’s Fair, “had this incredible instinct to perceive that Rodin had invented something new,” he explains to the AFP one of the curators of the sample, Véronique Mattiussi.
It was an “artistic shock,” he continues. Picasso realized that instead of representing the classic writer seated holding a pen, Rodin “paid homage to the creative force” of the author by representing him in a big way, such a colossus.
This departure from faithful representation to reality was one of the artistic pillars of Rodin and later of Picasso., as shown by the more than 500 works in the sample distributed in both museums and inaugurated on Wednesday three months late due to the pandemic.
Rodin: reference of the young Picasso
However, Picasso’s interest in Rodin was not born with Balzac, but with The Thinker. The Spanish artist had hung a photograph of the sculpture in his workshop in Barcelona, which undoubtedly served as inspiration for his famous canvas. Large bather with a book (1937), which illustrates a bather in the same reflective position.
The man from Malaga even had a “Rodinian period” (1900-1917), thus defined by the art historian Werner Spies, although it is probable that both artists did not get to know each other personally, despite having friends in common, such as the Spanish painter Ignacio Zuloaga and the writer Rainer Maria Rilke.
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During those years, Picasso experimented with the same expressionism as Rodin’s sculptures, often to show desolation and pain, capable of deforming the physiognomy.
“The human figure and also psychology became the center of the work of Rodin and later also of Picasso”, Mattiussi explains, showing the disheveled faces of the Crybabies of Rodin next to The woman who cries by Picasso, in the Rodin museum.
In that same room, two of the best-known works in art history are also confronted, revealing an undeniable similarity, although they are not the originals: Hell’s gate, by Rodin, and the Guernica, by Picasso, two monumental creations that denounce human cruelty with the same carnal language of decomposed bodies and faces in terror.
Eroticism, a common and permanent drive
But for both artists the body does not only express pain. The female figure and its erotic representation was surely Rodin and Picasso’s “favorite subject”, which they represented with “obsession”, according to Mattiussi. The kiss It is the famous classical and romantic sculpture by the French, but also a canvas by the Spanish that represents two avid lovers, joined by their lips.
The exhibition, open until January 2, 2022, also explores other convergences: from his attachment to nature and primitive art to simplify forms, to his inclination to carry out serial and unfinished works.
For Mattiussi, both artists “played in the same league” and their greatest reward was “to be the inventors of a new art”, in times of full transformation. For this reason, these “workaholics” gave themselves body and soul to a prolific production “beyond all logic”, oblivious to the “what will they say” of the public and critics.
Two geniuses
And it is that these two geniuses of art are still alive in the collections and tributes of prestigious museums around the world, in which their brushstrokes and sculptures keep the history and legacy of these referents of contemporary art alive in the memory of humanity. , but who are Rodín and Picasso?
Well, on the one hand, Auguste Rodin was one of the ‘fathers of modern sculpture’, a title that he achieved by departing from the aesthetic rules that the Parisian academy imposed in the 19th century, which led him to create a new stage of this type of art.
His ingenuity began to be noticed at the age of 10 when the French sculptor began to draw, and although on several occasions he did not manage to enter the School of Fine Arts, it did not prevent him from choosing the path of sculpture, because after that, in 1885 he began to model in clay, as an apprentice, at the Louvre Museum.
His first sculpture was Busto by Jean Bapttiste Rodin, her father, but it was never exhibited during her life years. Therefore, it is The mask of the man with the broken nose which is considered its first official creation, in 1863.
The winner, The Bronze Age, Saint John Baptist, Hell’s doors, The kiss, The Thinker, Adam and Eve Y The burghers of Calais are some of his most important works.
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For his part, Pablo Picasso, born in Malaga in 1881, in addition to having painted more than two thousand paintings, He not only dedicated his life to expressing his genius on canvas, but he also created a legacy in areas such as sculpture, was a ceramist and engraver.
Influenced by his father, a drawing teacher, he began his academic training first in his native Malaga, then in La Coruña in northwestern Spain, Barcelona, then in Madrid and by the avant-garde movement that cradled Paris, he settled there in 1904.
During this period Picasso, at 13 he created the first portrait, Lola, of his sister María Dolores, in which some details stand out that later stand out in other of his works. Then he decided to do a series of Lola.
His drawings, which at that time were in charcoal and pencil, they printed a style that went from symbolism to post-impressionism. Around 1900, as his portraits of his sister were transformed, so did this child prodigy, who became a radical artist.
From the 30s and until after the 60s, the man from Malaga immersed his art in the world of ceramics, a stage that his work accounts for Insect.
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