RODIN: TOWARD MODERNITY

RODIN: TOWARD MODERNITY will include 40 bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), regarded during his lifetime as the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo. Selected from the collections of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and Cincinnati Art Museum, the exhibition will include many of the French sculptor's most well-known works including “The Burghers of Calais”, “The Kiss”, studies for his largest commission, “The Gates of Hell” as well as Honoré de Balzac and St. John the Baptist.

The exhibition's centerpiece will be one of Rodin’s best-known sculptures, "The Burghers of Calais”. In 1885 the town council of the French city of Calais commissioned Rodin to produce a sculpture that would pay tribute to the burghers of Calais, heroes of the Hundred Years’ War, and symbols of French patriotism.

In 1347, according to the fourteenth-century Chronicles of Jean Froissart, King Edward III of England laid siege to the French town of Calais. After eleven months, with the people desperately short of food and water, six of the leading citizens, or burghers, of Calais offered themselves as hostages to Edward in exchange for the freedom of their city. The king agreed, ordering them to dress in plain garments, wear nooses around their necks, and journey to his camp bearing the keys to the city. Although the king intended to kill the burghers, his pregnant wife, Philippa, persuaded him to spare them, believing that their deaths would be a bad omen for her unborn child.

Rodin chose to portray the moment in the narrative when the men, believing they were going to die, left the city. He showed the burghers as vulnerable and conflicted, yet heroic in the face of their likely fate.

Special thanks to the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation and the North Carolina Museum of Art.