Overwhelming legacy

What a spectacle at the Royal Academy: the main galleries packed with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), in a massive show which dazzles with its vehement and emotional handling of materials. Here is a giant of an artist, but the paying public is overloaded with visual stimulus. It is simply impossible to take in so much at one time. How many visitors will return? How many have the time or will spend the money? (Admission is £10.) And yet this is work of central importance to the development of Western art in the last century and a half, not some petit maître like Modigliani, who is being given his second exhibition at the RA upstairs in the Sackler Wing. Rodin is credited with bringing sculpture into the modern age and with reasserting its importance after centuries of relative neglect. He deserves a whole series of exhibitions devoted to the various aspects of his prodigious output; instead we are given the one extended look. It’s stupendous, but also a little stupefying.

It’s not as if there was a shortage of work to borrow. When he died, Rodin left virtually everything he still owned to the French state. Most of what is at the RA comes from the Musée Rodin (the sculptor’s former home in Paris) and the store at his country house at Meudon. Admittedly, a number of exhibits are fragile, and we are exceptionally grateful for the loan of such items, but I have a sneaking suspicion that much on the international museum circuit that is not lent nowadays on the grounds of fragility is really down to politics and the officiousness of conservators. So, many thanks to the Rodin authorities for allowing these sculptures to travel (the exhibition will go on to the Kunsthaus in Zurich, 9 February to 13 May 2007), a gratitude qualified only by a feeling of regret that we will not be granted more time to discover Rodin’s depths in instalments rather than in one go.