Auguste Rodin, Master of the Human Form.

• Position: Sculpture, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina - Brief Article

An exhibition of more than 130 works by Auguste Rodin, one of the most important sculptors in Western art, offers a rare opportunity to see firsthand well-known pieces such as "The Thinker" and "The Kiss" and to experience in depth the major themes of Rodin's career, from intimate studies to monumental works.

Rodin (1840-1917) is regarded as the one of the greatest artists of his day and was considered by his contemporaries to be the most innovative and influential sculptor since Michelangelo. His genius lay in his ability to free sculpture from the academic and highly idealized conventions that characterized his predecessors' works.

Rodin's primary subject and source of inspiration was the human body, from simple studies to penetrating portraits to depictions of human passion and suffering--continually shocking the public with his sensual subject matter and frequent fragmentation and abstraction of the human form. With a vigorous modeling technique that was subjective and impressionistic, he captured movement and expressed emotion by altering traditional poses and gestures to create intense, highly personal...