Art Chowder November | December, Issue 18 | Page 36

RODIN:
TRUTH
FORM LIFE
By Melville Holmes
Selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collections
The Jundt Art Museum, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington
Balzac in Dominican Robe, modeled 1893
Musée Rodin cast 9 in 1981
Bronze; Georges Rudier Foundry
Lent by Iris Cantor
Photo credit: cannellfan on VisualHunt.com / CC BY-NC
F
rom September 8, 2018 through
January 5, 2019 visitors to Spokane’s
Jundt Art Museum have a rare
opportunity to view twenty-five bronze
sculptures by Auguste Rodin (1840-
1917). In this beautifully mounted and
highly informative exhibition one visitor
described her experience as coming
face to face with the huge, ineffable
concerns of life and death, love and fate,
humor and genius, and hope against
hopelessness: a kind of human majesty
and gravitas. Rodin was indeed one of
the great masters of all time, arguably
the last sculptor of genius since Bernini,
and kin to the Old Masters of painting.
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ART CHOWDER MAGAZINE
The exhibition contains works that
are complete in themselves, such
as the portrait busts of Victor Hugo
and Rodin’s father, the walking St.
John the Baptist Preaching, and the
strange Youth Triumphant (also called
Young Girl and Fate). But over half
of the pieces are studies or parts of
larger works. There are independent
studies of hands, for example, and
preparatory stages in the development
of The Burghers of Calais or the
monumental Balzac. Besides these
there are parts of complex sculptures,
detached and cast in their own right,
or even reinvented after the fact, as
with one of the Shades from The
Gates of Hell.