'The Making of Rodin' at Tate Modern

The big exhibition at the newly re-opened Tate Modern is all about Rodin, particularly his work in plaster. The Musee Rodin in Paris has loaned a lot of works to help show Rodin's process of making sculptures. There are sketches (often in watercolour), small models of much larger sculptures, many versions of body parts to practice getting hands, for example, just right, and even nude plaster statues to get the stance of a model just right before adding the clothes. There are some fascinating pieces here. It's not the biggest exhibition but is well worth seeing.

The first exhibit is 'The Age of Bronze' in a room of it's own. A willowy young man cast in bronze. It's a gorgeous statue but it doesn't really fit in with the rest of the exhibition and I suspect it's there to say 'this is what Rodin was capable of doing', with it's smooth, elegant lines and surfaces before moving on to the rougher plaster 'sketches'.

The next room is big and has a load of works on a central display to walk round in the one-way route so you get a chance to see the front and back of the statues. 'The Thinker' is, of course, the first thing you see, but I think my favourites were the 'sketches' of figures Rodin produced to try out his ideas. There's a rather portly 'Balzac' and a few studies for a naked 'St John the Baptist'. There was also a lovely small statue (small? maybe three feet tall?) of one of the figures in 'The Burghers of Calais', naked here even though he wears a full-body robe in the actual finished work. This was Rodin working out what the stance should look like and it's quite clear when you look at both the study and the finished work which character he was working on. It just wouldn't occur to me to do a naked study to work out how a clothed figure should look. I was most impressed.

Moving along and there is 'The Burghers of Calais' standing on the floor rather than raised up so a lot easier to see the details. There's a bronze cast of this statue outside Parliament so I'm familiar with it but it was fascinating to see this original version and walk round it peering at the details. The Burghers were six leaders of Calais in 1346-47 who surrendered to King Edward III to get him to spare the city. They expected to be executed but were spared. It's a great work and I wandered around it several times looking at the details. Look at those legs, the feet and hands, the way the clothes fall ... it suddenly all made sense why he would model the naked bodies before adding the clothes.

There are, of course, many more works to see at the exhibition but these are my highlights. The exhibition only opened a couple of weeks ago so there's plenty of time to see it yet and it's well worth a viewing.

'The Kiss' is also on display but outside the exhibition and it's great to be able to walk all the way round the work. They're definitely into a full-on snog.

'Bronze' at The Royal Academy

I went to see the 'Bronze' exhibition of, um, bronzes, at The Royal Academy last week and it's well worth a visit. The blurb on the RA website says:

Arranged thematically, Bronze brings together outstanding works from antiquity to the present. Different sections focus on the Human Figure, Animals, Groups, Objects, Reliefs, Gods, Heads and Busts. The exhibition features stunning Ancient Greek, Roman and Etruscan bronzes, through to rare survivals from the Medieval period. The Renaissance is represented by the works of artists such as Ghiberti, Donatello, Cellini, and later Giambologna, De Vries and others. Bronzes by Rodin, Boccioni, Picasso, Jasper Johns, Moore, Beuys and Bourgeois are representative of the best from the 19th century to today.

Bronze has been employed as an artistic medium for over five millennia. It is an alloy consisting mainly of copper, with lesser amounts of tin, zinc and lead. Due to its inherent toughness and resistance, the material’s uses over the centuries have been remarkably varied. A section of the exhibition has been devoted to the complex processes involved in making bronze, enabling visitors to explore how models are made, cast and finished by a variety of different techniques. The exhibition offers a unique exploration of artistic practice, an understanding of the physical properties and distinctive qualities of bronze, and the rare opportunity to see the very best examples in one place.

So there you have it from the horse's mouth. Personally, I prefer to gawp at the art rather than get too precious about it (unless it's worth getting precious about, of course).

The first thing you see on going into the exhibition is the huge 'Dancing Satyr' on a plinth in the middle of the first room. He was pulled out of the sea by fishermen a few years ago and rose head-first, like he was rising from the seabed to revisit the world he last knew a couple of millennia ago. He really is quite impressive and a fitting start to the exhibition.

We then move into a room full of figures, of people cast in bronze from across the centuries and continents, all clustered together in one room. There was something there to suit everyone but I picked out a monumental copy of Cellini's 'Perseus and Medusa' re-cast by Clemente Papi in 1844 for big wows and a tiny figure in a glass case of a naked acrobat performing a handstand by Prieur from around 1600 for the sheer fun and joy of it.

The exhibition then moves on to animals and the first one we see is a chimera from about 400BCE with a lion's head and paws, a snake for a tail, and antelope growing out of his back and all sorts of other weirdness melded together as one animal. The star of this section, though, was the magnificent 'Il Porcellino' from Florence, better known to me as Piggy! A lovely statue of a bronze pig used as a fountain with water dripping from his mouth and surrounded by pond creatures. This is the original that now lives in a museum but I've stroked the snout of his counterpart outside the market in Florence and that means I will go back one day.

In other rooms there was a rather large statue of Shiva Nataraja dancing in his wheel of cosmic fire, Lord of the Dance as he destroys and creates the world, destroying ignorance and welcoming the flame of wisdom. In this room of 'gods' there's also a life-sized statue of Jesus, a pot-bellied Ganesha and one statue of Buddha. Elsewhere there's a small statue of 'Yashoda Nursing the Infant Krishna' which is quite a domestic scene until you notice the baby Krishna has his lips to one nipple and his fingers to the other, tweaking his foster-mothe's nipple.  Well, he is Krishna after all.

Two of my favourite pieces were 'Untitled' by Anish Kapoor from 2012, a big, polished bronze dish hung on the wall in which you can see yourself upside-down as you approach and leave and a bust of Catherine d'Medici from about 1590, an imperious and scary lady. While I loved the Anish Kapoor for its simplicity and fun and kept going back to move around in front of it to see what might happen, I wouldn't want to go to visit Catherine.

So there you go. There's something for everyone at the exhibition and it's a good way of spending a couple of hours out of the rain (and it was pouring down when I went).