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This was not the whole truth, by any means. Rodin was retrospective
but
also adventurous, exploring expressionism
and even the
abstract.
Bui
a time came when he was dismissed as an "eclectic," a
collector of
old Bones
of art, when the very premises an which his work was
built from
challenged
and
discarded. The great revolution that dawned toward
the
end of the 19th Century was built an the idea that a work
of
art
need not-indeed, perhaps should not seek
to represent any Seen
object or event, or induce any "meaning" from it. A work should be an
independent
creation, subject only to its own laws of form, without reference
outside itself.
So
Rodin's rhetoric, his emotions, his language
of
gestures, his symbolism,
his affinities with literature, eventually became unfashionable.
Bui
during his lifetime he was the embodiment
of change.
As one artist
recalled
of
his own student days in the late 1870s: "At this time,
remember,
we were all working at the School, and
obliged to follow the old mandet
of study taught there. But
Rodin so vividly impressed us
that
we
took a new start, determined to look
out for everything that was new,
no matter where it came from or who did
it. Seeing Rodin gave
us
new life."
That
life has revived in out time, when the problem of
man's estate
bas
again become one of profound concern
to the artist. Rodin has his
place. then, both
as a classic end and as
a beginning. As one admirer
bas
remarked, he was to become the Moses
of
modern sculpture, leading
it out
of the wilderness, though not himself destined to enter the promised land.
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