The Portrait Workshop: Rodin Faces His Models

4 December 2009 – 28 March 2010

Angers Museum of Fine Arts

The Angers Museum of Fine Arts presents "The Portrait Workshop: Rodin Faces His Models". This coproduction with the Musée Rodin in Paris is accompanied by Isabelle Lévénez's "Fragmented Portraits: Videos/Drawings", both as part of the Rodin exhibition and in the museum's Prints and Drawings section.

At once an art workshop and a depiction of a society, this exhibition invites us to discover Rodin's substantial yet relatively unknown oeuvre as a portraitist. Here the spotlight is on the creative process underlying the construction of his works.
Artists, politicians, bankers, women of the world, Frenchmen and foreigners: here are the faces of Rodin's contemporaries, immortalised in sculpture, brought together in a single exhibition, and in some cases on public display for the first time.
It was confrontation with his models, that guarantee of truth, that enabled Rodin to breathe life into his portraits. In order to capture their physical and psychological characteristics, he worked his clay from sketches taken from life or from photographs. His goal was above all to catch the very essence of his subject: this meant abandoning mere resemblance for an intensification of matter and scale which, combined with formal simplification, allowed him to bend nature to his will.
In the case of his posthumous portraits, he had no qualms about recourse to a process of substitution, of typological definition of the subject: the facial traits were simplified or emphasised, with the detailed and the specific sacrificed to the general. It is this disparity between the model and the individual, between the subject and the final result, that conveys to the full Rodin's interpretative and symbolic power. 
The Angers exhibition is testimony to the Musée Rodin's determination to have its collection travel. For local residents the coming of Rodin to Angers is particularly significant: Pierre-Jean David d’Angers (1788–1856) was a marvellous portraitist who opened the 19th century as Rodin would close it, and who in 1839 was honoured by the city of Angers with France's first museum dedicated to a living sculptor. A fervent admirer of the David d’Angers oeuvre, Rodin had been especially influenced by the expressive power that emphasised, honed or expanded on physical traits; the comparison between the two is foregrounded in the exhibition – and in the David d’Angers Gallery – by their busts of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, executed several decades apart.
Born in 1970, Isabelle Lévénez is also a portraitist; but in her own way, in that her work is an endless investigation of the individual's relationship to the world and to others. Her videos present the human body – often her own – as fragmented or immersed in a strange luminosity somewhere between fiction and reality: Il recherche Elle (He Seeks She, 2003), Désir (Desire, 2004), and Frontière (Border, 2009) punctuate the Rodin exhibition, while the works on paper specially created for the event – anatomical ink drawings highlighted with red watercolour – mingle gentleness and violence in their speculations on the body, the face and the double. One group is on show at the entrance to the Rodin exhibition, while a suite of faces and bodies is to be found in the Prints and Drawings room.     

Opening hours: Tuesday–Sunday, 10 am–6 pm
Admission: 4 €/3 €

Exhibition curator: Aline Magnien
Director, Musées d'Angers: Patrick Le Nouëne

Catalogue

Rodin, la fabrique du portrait, with texts by Paolo Tortonese, Aline Magnien, Hélène Marraud, Jean-Benoit Birck, Véronique Mattiussi, Itzhak Goldberg and Dominique Viéville, Editions du Musée Rodin, 168 pages, 29.90 €