RODIN AT TATE MODERN

This was a thoroughly enjoyable show featuring the plaster works. Although the large scale works such as the portrait of Balzac, the Burghers of Calais and The Thinker all commanded their spaces and imposed their powerful expressiveness on the viewer, I found myself mesmerised by the small scale works featuring pairs of figures in various interlocking poses. These had a wonderful tactility and inventiveness. Rodin was fascinated by the natural weathered fragmentation of classical antiquity sculpture and used such fragmentation in wilful ways to add texture, create greater visual contrast and changes of direction, limbs suddenly stopping, breaking their line, but rather than dislocating the wholeness, they worked in integral and wholly satisfying ways. At times they almost felt like rapid, three-dimensional sketches, but this reading misses their “gravity”, as works.