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.