AUGUSTE RODIN | Main droite n°31, petit modèle

Musée Rodin, Paris (acquired in 1963)
Private Collection, Geneva (acquired from the above in 1963)
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Stockholm, Nationalmuseum på Konstakademien & Helsinki, Konstmuseet Ateneum, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) och Norden, 2016, no. 30, illustration of another cast p. 69

Varied brown patina. Apart from the dust in the crevices and minor verdigris to the inside of the hand, this work is in very good overall condition.
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Auguste Rodin is hailed as the father of Modern sculpture and his works feature in the most important public and private institutions worldwide. The human body was Rodin’s preoccupation throughout his working life and he habitually observed real models to create anatomically accurate as well as emotionally intense sculptures. Like other sculptors, Rodin was trained to work in studies and partial figures, however unlike other sculptors Rodin in the mid-1880s came to recognise that ‘a part’ could be as expressive as a whole; in a pioneering move he began to exhibit these so-called ‘fragments’ as self-sufficient works of art. The most important among these are his models of hands. For Rodin, the hand was a crucial vehicle for expression – being the embodiment of ‘the gesture’. The artist’s direct and unrelenting scrutiny of hand gestures resulted in a series of models that are not only biologically incisive but also charged with astonishing expressive power. In 2014, The Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University held a ground-breaking exhibition entitled Inside Rodin’s Hands: Art, Technology and Surgery. Building upon one professor’s practice of presenting Rodin’s hands to medical students and surgery trainees, the exhibition merged art and science, even enabling students to perform virtual surgery on the bronze hands in a feat of augmented reality. Dr Chang of Stanford University observed: ‘I have found that artists and surgeons appreciate human anatomy with equal passion.’

This work will be included in the forthcoming Catalogue Critique de l'œuvre sculpté d'Auguste Rodin being prepared by Galerie Brame & Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2017-5608B.