Auguste Rodin

The Age of Bronze (L'Age d'airain), 1876

Plaster
71 1/2 x 25 1/2 x 21 1/4 in. (181.6 x 64.8 x 54 cm.)

First outrage, then praise, greeted Rodin’s The Age of Bronze. Rodin originally intended to title this work The Vanquished as a tribute to casualties in the Franco-Prussian war and initially posed his model holding a spear in his left hand. By removing the spear, Rodin created an ambiguity of meaning that puzzled critics, some of whom also found the supple modeling of anatomy so life-like that they accused him of making a mold directly from the model’s body. To defend himself, Rodin produced photographs of his model in the same pose for comparison. He also changed the work’s title, playing upon the sense of awakening created by the figure’s upraised arms and closed eyes, to suggest the dawning of ancient man’s self-consciousness.

The same ambiguity that drew criticism from more traditional quarters served as beacon to artists and writers seeking a new path.  Rainer Maria Rilke, the Bohemian-Austrian poet whose 1903 monograph on Rodin served as the primary interpretation of his sculpture for decades, praised the expressionistic qualities in the work, writing that The Age of Bronze marked “the birth of gesture in the work of Rodin.” In this sculpture, Rilke saw in the face, “that pain of a heavy awakening.”

Exhibition:

May 20 - August 13, 2017

Coinciding with the exhibition Roni Horn, the Nasher Sculpture Center’s curators have chosen works from the Nasher Collection to complement Horn’s installation and draw connections between Horn and artists of the distant and more recent past. Horn is an avid reader and frequently includes excerpts of literary texts in the subtitles of her works, as with her cast glass sculptures on view in the adjacent gallery. Literary themes appear prominently in other bodies of work too, notably in Horn’s drawings, in which the artist combines excerpts from literature with idiomatic phrases, and also in a series of aluminum sculptures in which the artist embeds the words of poet Emily Dickinson.