Auguste Rodin: In association with musée Rodin, Paris

PREFACE

A major exhibition on the theme of the relations between Rodin and Great Britain will be held at the Royal Academy of Art in September 2006.  At the same time as this event, the Rodin Museum, in partnership with  Coskun will present in London about forty original bronzes intended for sale.  French legislation only permits twelve copies of each of these original bronzes, which have been produced from moulds included in Rodin’s donation to the French State in 1916.

In addition to the studies connected with the monuments to Balzac, Victor Hugo and The Burghers of Calais, as well as the Whistler Muse, commissioned from Rodin in 1903 on the death of the painter James Mac Neil Whistler, the Coskun Gallery will display a series of sculptures illustrating how Rodin conceived his works in the secrecy of his studios and the silence of solitary creation.

The aesthetics of fragmentation and assemblage, of deconstructing and restructuring, are the keys of an intimate creation now being discovered. This new viewpoint is far removed from the image of the dramatic and ideal beauty that sometimes prevailed in the eyes of art lovers.

In the same spirit as the exhibition held at this art gallery in 2000, the works presented today affirm the role played by Rodin as one of the founding fathers of modern sculpture.  They reveal the principal aspects of the research carried out by the artist, in keeping with the aesthetics he pursued throughout his life, that is to say, he eliminated accessories and superfluous details to focus on the essential, erasing all anecdotal references and highlighting the relationship between volume and space through the techniques of assemblage and fragmentation.

I wish to thank Mrs. Gül Coskun for all her efforts to promote the oeuvre of Rodin in Britain for so many years, and express my firm conviction that the exhibition she is presenting today will meet all the success it deserves.

General Heritage Curator

Director of the Rodin Museum