How Rodin Brought Sexy Back to Sculpture

“Art,” Auguste Rodin once said, “is only a kind of love. I know quite well that bashful moralists will stop up their ears. But what! I express in a loud voice what all artists think. Desire! Desire! what a formidable stimulant!” Love was the drug that art, particularly sculpture, was waiting for, and Rodin positioned himself as the main dealer of that “formidable stimulant.” In David J. Getsy’s Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture, Rodin emerges not only as a sculptor of sexually charged works, but also as a sculptor who made sex integral to the very practice of sculpture. After centuries of art that looked back to classical days, Rodin brought sexy back to sculpture and ushered in a new age of modern sculpture emphasizing the individual, including the individual expression of desire. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to red more of "How Rodin Brought Sexy Back to Sculpture."

[Image: Auguste Rodin. Eternal Springtime. 1894.]

[Many thanks to Yale University Press for providing me with a review copy of David J. Getsy’s Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture.]

Paper Trail: Michelangelo in a New, Old Medium

“My beard points to heaven, and I feel the nape of my neck on my hump,” Michelangelo wrote in a poem about his experience painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. “I bend my breast like a harpy’s, and, with nonstop dripping from above, my brush makes my face a richly decorated floor.” To accompany that poem, the artist sketched himself at work, stretching up to apply paint to the freshly applied plaster (detail shown above). In Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, Leonard Barkan, a professor of comparative literature at Princeton University, examines how Michelangelo—best known for timeless works chiseled from stone or painted on architectural surfaces—revealed his deepest self on that most fragile of media, paper. By following Michelangelo’s paper trail, Barkan discovers a more versatile artist of both pictures and words who seems more human and strikingly more modern than the Renaissance genius of legend. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Paper Trail."

[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of Leonard Barkan’s Michelangelo: A Life on Paper.]

A Matter of Interpretation: Is All Art History Western Art History?

It’s human nature to try to understand something new by comparing it to something we already know. We always interpret the present based on past experience. But when we make that interpretation via comparison, are we being fair to the new experience, or the old one, for that matter? “Comparisons are like mercury,” writes art theorist James Elkins in his controversial new book, Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History, “the big blobs can be cut and divided into little droplets, but they can never be entirely dissolved away. Even the tiniest atomized droplets, which seem so isolated, can be virulent.” That virulence stems from each comparison containing “a microcosm of assumptions,” in this case about how we view Chinese art through the lens of Western art. In Elkins view, the use of Western examples to understand non-Western art, including Chinese art, does a disservice to both fields. Perhaps even worse, the very study of art history itself is incurably Western thanks to the infection of past practice. How then do we ever understand art beyond the Western tradition? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "A Matter of Interpretation."

[Image: Dong Qichang. Thatched Hall. 1597.]

[Many thanks to the University of Washington Press for providing me with a review copy of Chinese Landscape Painting as Western Art History by James Elkins, with a foreword by Jennifer Purtle.]