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[wylies99]

Rodin Exhibition to Open April 30

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/art/2010/03/148_62262.html

By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter

Famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) will be coming to Seoul next month.

``Hand of God: Rodin Retrospective,'' touted as the first major Rodin retrospective in the country, will be held at the Seoul Museum of Art, downtown Seoul, from April 30 to August 22.

The exhibition, organized by the Seoul Museum of Art, Hankook Ilbo and KBS, will feature 180 works from the collection of the Rodin Museum in Paris. This includes 110 sculptures and 40 sketches and drawings made by Rodin throughout the decades.

Rodin is widely considered as the artist who revolutionized the world of sculpture. ``Rodin was the first sculptor to depict man not as god-like, but as human,'' said Seo Soun-jou, Hankook Ilbo Cultural Project Center director.

Visitors will have a chance to marvel at the beauty and fluidity of Rodin's masterpieces, at the exhibition. ``I have always tried to render inner feelings through the mobility of the muscles... Without life, art does not exist,'' Rodin once said.

Among his masterpieces to be displayed at the show are ``Hand of God,'' ``The Thinker'' and ``The Kiss.''

``Hand of God,'' also known as ``Creation,'' is a beautiful marble sculpture of a gigantic hand holding a nude figure. In this piece, Rodin broke away from conventional compositions and adopted a form appealing to imagination. ``The hand powerfully molding the matter from which the human being is created represents the divinity bringing forth humanity from emptiness. It is also a symbolic image of the artist inventing a world,'' the Rodin Museum said, on its Web site.

Rodin was also known as a sculptor of the erotic, for many of his pieces that explored sensuality, eroticism and passion. In ``The Kiss,'' two figures are locked in passionate embrace. The two figures were originally meant to represent Paolo and Francesca, characters from Italian poet Dante's ``Divine Comedy.''

Rodin's most famous work is probably ``The Thinker,'' which was originally intended to show Dante contemplating on his work and placed at the summit of ``Gates of Hell.'' The sculpture's meaning evolved to represent a man in a meditative pose. It was Rodin's first work to be placed in a public space, in front of the Pantheon in April 1906. It was later moved to the garden of the Rodin Museum.

Another significant piece to be shown is Rodin's sculpture of French novelist Honore de Balzac, which ushered in the ``new sculptural language of the 20th century.'' Commissioned by the Societe des Gens de Lettres in 1883 to pay homage to Balzac, Rodin chose to depict the novelist not by physical appearance but the ``essence of his personality.'' The final work ``Balzac'' caused a stir and was rejected by the society.

``The Head of Camille Claudel'' is another representative work by Rodin, showing his mistress and fellow artist Claudel. Claudel, an aspiring sculptor, was only 17 when she met the 41-year-old Rodin in Paris in 1882. For years, they engaged in an intense affair, and Claudel became an artist, but was plagued with psychological problems and institutionalized for 30 years before her death.

Other Rodin sculptures to be shown include ``Crouching Woman,'' ``Iris, Messenger of the Gods,'' ``Rodin's Hand'' and ``Eternal Spring.''

The Rodin exhibition in Seoul is expected to attract around 550,000 to 600,000 visitors during its nearly four-month run. This is the latest in a series of high-profile exhibitions of master artists, such as Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Vincent Van Gogh and Pierre Auguste Renoir, in Seoul in recent years.

So far, the most successful exhibition was the Van Gogh exhibition, which attracted 820,000 visitors during its run from Nov. 24, 2007 to March 16, 2008.

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[Arthur Dent]

Thanks Wylies, I'll be going to see that...

[wylies99]

I know it's about six weeks away, so we should post a reminder when it gets closer to the opening.