Erotic Rodin

6 March – 14 June 2009

Some of Rodin’s most famous sculptures, from L’Age d’Airain to Balzac nu not for-getting Le Baiser, Jeux de Nymphes, Le Torse d’Adèle, Iris messagère des dieux or Le Christ et la Madeleine, are on show in this exhibition and provide food for thought on the fine line between nudism and eroticism, between sensuality and the obscene, between transgression and profanation.
Parallel to his carved work, Rodin drew, throughout his life, and left us about 10,000 works on paper, of which approximately 7000 are preserved at the Rodin Museum in Paris. Al-though only a piecemeal selection of the works on paper can be shown, they do not for all that constitute a small part of Rodin’s art, of which he said at the end of his life: "It is quite simple, my drawings are the key to my work" (Rene Benjamin, "Auguste Rodin draw-ings", Gil Blas, 17 October - 8 November 1910).
From the end of the Eighties, Rodin was almost obsessive and jubilatory in the way he pro-duced drawings which are just so many variations on the same topic, that of the naked woman’s body. Henceforth, the artist was to draw almost exclusively live models ("I can work only with a live model", he confided to Dujardin-Baumetz, "the sight of the hu-man form inspires and comforts me. "). He finally had the means to call on models who would come in daily and strip down in his studio one after the other, or sometimes two or three at a time. He did not have them pose, but caught them in the most spontaneous and free of their movements and attitudes, in a constant quest for truth. Two principal types can be distinguished in these drawings. In the first, the artist draws briskly on a sheet, with a fine graphite point, in a few minutes and without taking his eyes off his model ("The hand takes off on its own; often the pencil misses the paper; the drawing is decapitated or loses a member… the Master did not look at it once. In less than a minute, this snapshot of the movement is set down…", testified Clement-Janin in 1903). The second type is a rehash or copy of one of these "unseen drawings", with a view to purifying, simplifying and synthe-sising it, generally picked out in watercolour ("Once he has completed this first try, Rodin reworks it, sometimes correcting it directly with a stroke of red pencil, but generally by copy-ing it …", Clement-Janin continued.)
Of Rodin’s drawings, nearly a thousand – commonly regarded as erotic – were not locked up in a private office but were shown by the artist along with his sculptures, confirming their status of masterpieces. The ninety or so drawings exhibited at the Gianadda Foundation be-long to this exceptional group. There the artist reveals the intimate and enthusiastic work to which he devoted most of the last two decades of his life. He managed to create a certain complicity with his models, inducing them to adopt new, sensual, extravagant attitudes, to caress one another, to reveal the most intimate parts of their bodies, to spread their bodies ever wider, sometimes in acrobatic poses, in order without ambiguity and false modesty, to expose their genitals, their pleasure, their anticipation. The woman’s genitals, this source of vital force and energy, almost always exposed, occupies the foreground of the sheet. Drawing the genitals, is to draw what is most true. In his drawings, of extraordinary audacity and free-dom, Rodin moves ever closer to the truth of the human body.

Nadine Lehni.

The catalogue of the Rodin Erotique exhibition reproduces in full colour all the works on show. Selling price CHF 45.– (approx. € 30).
The Erotic Rodin exhibition
The Franck Collection
The Sculpture Park
The Gallo-Roman Museum and
the Motor Museum
are open daily
from 10 am to 6 pm
from 6 March to 14 June 2009