Auguste Rodin artwork • statue • sculpture • previously for sale Christ and Mary Magdalene

Auguste Rodin is one of the most important French sculptors of the late 19th century. His life and oeuvre are characterized by enormous creativity and nonconformism. Rodin broke with the academic sculpture tradition, characterized by strict rules of representation and traditional historic and mythological themes. To his friend the sculptor and painter Bourdelle he wrote: ‘It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture’. Rodin’s work – in bronze, clay and stone – invites us to see beyond the boundaries of the subject. His figures are realistic, deeply passionate and show a ferocity of modeling that intensifies, also by the effects of light, its expression. The sculptor was fascinated by movement, which he tried to capture in his statues. Famous sculptures are ‘The Thinker’ and ‘The Burghers of Calais’. The manner in which the entwined figures in ‘Le Christ et la Madeleine’ have been partly hewn out of the marble block remind us of the above mentioned famous Italian master who said that every block of stone has a statue inside it and that it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.