Rodin/Arp

Edited by Raphaël Bouvier. 200 pp. incl. 125 col. + b. & w. ills. (Fondation Beyeler, Basel, and Hatje Cantz, Berlin, 2020), £58. ISBN 978–3–7757–4875–9.

Picasso-Rodin

Edited by Catherine Chevillot, Virginie Perdrisot-Cassan and Véronique Mattiussi. 424 pp. incl. 490 col. + b. & w. ills. (Musée Rodin, Paris, Musée national Picasso-Paris, and Gallimard, Paris, 2021), €45. ISBN 978–2–07–292758–4.

Delays to exhibition planning caused by the coronavirus pandemic have led to the serendipitous concurrence of two separate exhibitions that explore the convergence between Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and two artists who might have only fleetingly crossed his path, but whose modernist status is similarly eminent: the perpetually popular inventor of Cubism and evergreen stylistic acrobat Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Jean (Hans) Arp (1886–1966), the first-hour Dadaist, maverick Surrealist and trailblazer of biomorphic abstraction.

Originally scheduled to open in September 2020, Picasso-Rodin – simultaneously presented at the Musée Rodin, Paris, and the Musée national Picasso-Paris – now coincides with Rodin/Arp at the Fondation Beyeler, Basel.(1) Both exhibitions are collaborations with the Musée Rodin under the enlightened directorship of Catherine Chevillot, and both are firsts in terms of bringing the respective artists together in a museum environment.(2) Precedence and association aside, these are two very different shows, which is evident even in the order of names and choice of punctuation in their titles.

On the one hand, Picasso-Rodin, co-curated by Chevillot with Virginie Perdrisot-Cassan, curator at the Musée Picasso, is a powerful partnership between two of France’s most prominent monographic museums that brings together works in all mediums and of all periods by its gargantuan subjects. Rodin/Arp, on the other hand, is concentrated in its approach. It focuses on sculptures, reliefs and works on paper that pertain, for the most part, to Arp’s post-1930 activity, when he began to devote himself to sculpture in the round. It is the brainchild of Raphaël Bouvier, curator at the Fondation Beyeler, who has edited both the English and German editions of the catalogue and curated the forthcoming German iteration of the exhibition (27th June–14th November) at the Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck, Remagen, with Astrid von Asten, who is in charge of the Arp Collection there. Bouvier’s exacting selection of 110 works from public and private collections worldwide tracks the evolution of modern sculpture from Rodin’s rei vention of statuary to Arp’s biomorphic abstraction. The show is motivated by Arp’s repeated references to Rodin in his writings, work titles and sculptural practice, as well as his ties with the city of Basel.

By contrast, Picasso-Rodin reflects the ambition of two single-artist collections to endorse each other by celebrating their respective subjects as the ultimate monstres sacrées of modern art. Drawing mainly from the museums’ vast collections and lasting nearly a year, the two-venue Parisian show is also presenting itself as a leading example of sustainable exhibition making. It relies on local resources and its substantial catalogue, published only in French, has been limited in size by reproducing only one fifth of the more than ve hundred works on display. 

Véronique Mattiussi’s and Isabelle Rouge-Ducos’s contribution to the volume, which examines the history and ethos of the two institutions, is one of four introductory essays that collectively function to emphasise the points of contact between two geniuses. The role that friendship and gift economy played in the artists’ lives, as well as their individual relationships with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was Rodin’s secretary and an early advocate of Picasso, are discussed at length in Sophie Biass-Fabiani’s and Olivier Berggruen’s texts, respectively. Rilke, incidentally, played an important role for Arp too; the ‘Biographies’ section at the end of Rodin/Arp, compiled by L. Feledy, highlights the poet’s role as the likely intermediary of a possible meeting between the two artists. In Rodin/Arp, however, biography remains peripheral to what is, fundamentally, a discussion of similar aesthetic strategies.

Picasso-Rodin, on the other hand, is first and foremost a show about two art giants. Significantly, the two artists’ revolutionary approaches to traditional sculptural materials and processes are examined in detail only by Diana Widmaier Picasso in her catalogue essay. Also, two of the most prominent pairings in the exhibition and the catalogue – Firstly Rodin’s Gates of Hell (1880–1900) and Picasso’s Guernica (1937), represented by studies and reproductions; secondly, Picasso’s painting The kiss (no.143; Fig.13) and the plaster of Rodin’s famous sculpture of the same title (no.144; Fig.14) – highlight profound dierences between Picasso’s crude realism and Rodin’s romantic idealism.

The focal points of the show are Rodin’s and Picasso’s kindred attitudes to artistic production; their shared capacity to absorb and catalyse the intellectual life of their time; and their comparable assertiveness in promoting and establishing their own legacies. At the core of the catalogue is a series of brief essays. They introduce the various sections of the exhibition, which are organised around four broad themes: ‘Picasso’s Rodin Period’; ‘A Crisis in Representation’; ‘Reinventing Figuration’; and ‘Perennial Renewal’. The last, which occupies by far the largest portion of the publication, surveys a number of modernist practices – cut-outs, assemblage, seriality, imprint, biomorphism and monumentality – that would deserve more in-depth discussion. Three factual sections end the volume: a chronology, an anthology of literary references and a ‘cosmological’ map of networks that demonstrates historical connections between Rodin and Picasso.

In Rodin/Arp, these connections are the springboard for an exhibition that aims ‘to make the formal, thematic, and conceptual relationships between the works immediately palpable’ (p.14). In his introduction to the catalogue, Bouvier sketches the salient moments in which Arp felt close to Rodin, before and after he moved with Sophie Taeuber-Arp to Clamart, near the late Rodin’s Meudon home, in 1929. These moments inform the opening section of the exhibition and the artists’ biographies by Lilien Feledy at the end of the volume. They also inform the opening section of the exhibition, entitled ‘Homages and Affinities’, which begins with Arp’s Automatic sculpture (Homage to Rodin), a Surrealist work that the artist made in 1938 (cat. pp.28 and 30; Fig.16). Notably, the homage of the title emerged only after completion, at a time when Rodin’s popularity among young sculptors was in decline.

The plaster and granite versions of Arp’s sculpture are paralleled with a plaster and bronze of Rodin’s Crouching woman (pp.29 and 31; Fig.15). Set against contrasting black and grey backgrounds, Arp’s granite and Rodin’s plaster are juxtaposed on the cover of the catalogue to dramatic effect. They beautifully spearhead the compelling argument in bringing these two artists together under the umbrella of a shared aesthetic that bridges Symbolism and Surrealism, figuration and abstraction. The remaining three sections of the catalogue – ‘Fragmentation, Assemblage, and Chance’, ‘Nature, Creation and Growth’ and ‘Movement and Transformation’– further illustrate this idea, while the accompanying essays by Jana Teuscher, Chevillot and Tessa Paneth-Pollak give it historical and aesthetic substance. Both Rodin and Arp, they argue, initiated a reinvention of the relationship between art and nature, in which art no longer aimed to merely imitate but instead to compete with nature; by appropriating nature’s processes of origin and growth in their artistic practice, both artists reformulated, in different ways, the union of life and art outside the canons of naturalism.

For all their dissimilarities, Picasso-Rodin and Rodin/Arp unwittingly underpin each other in their choice of subject and methodology. Although they strengthen Rodin’s place in the lineage of the avant-garde, they demonstrate an interest in discussing works by different artists outside the traditional framework of influence. They celebrate the value of anachronic comparison and of difference over similitude in creating new and insightful art historical narratives.

1. Both Paris venues of Picasso-Rodin are yet to open to the public due to government restrictions. Rodin/Arp opened in December 2020 but has remained closed for part of its run.

2. The relationship between Rodin and Arp was previously the subject of a small gallery exhibition and of a published conference paper. See exh. cat. Arp, Rodin, Los Angeles (Feingarten Galleries) 1971; and C. Derout: ‘Arp et Rodin’, in J. Chatelain, ed.: Rodin et la sculpture contemporaine: Compte-rendu du colloque organisé par le Musée Rodin du 11 au 15 octobre 1982 au Musée Rodin, Paris 1983, pp.139–46. Picasso-Rodin originates from a paper, ‘Picasso: Sculptures’, presented by Catherine Chevillot at a symposium at the Musée Picasso in 2016.