A Parisian version of the exhibition presented at Evian last summer, Corps et décors reveals a little-known dimension of Rodin’s work devoted to monumental decoration and the decorative arts. The public will discover many of the exhibition’s hundred and fifty works—vases, objets d’art, drawings, and decorative sculptures—for the very first time, since they have never before been displayed. The exhibition also offers the occasion to rediscover some of Rodin’s well-known works, such as The Gates of Hell, in a decorative context.
Corps et décors is an opportunity to consider the very contemporary question of the status and value of the decorative arts, which was the subject of aesthetic debates at the end of the 19th century.
Decoration is not a crime,
exhibition commissioner François Blanchetière, remarks, not without humour. Corps et décors thus presents a reflection on the place of Rodin in the universe of the decorative arts and of monumental decoration in an era where the traditional compartmentalization of artistic domains had broken down, resulting in multiple exchanges. The works exhibited evoke many questions and debates characteristic of the late 19th century: the unity of the arts, going beyond historical styles, the decorative value of works of art, the conditions of a monumental decoration, the diffusion of great art. The course of the exhibition allows visitors to relive these important debates in which Rodin participated, through both his life and his work, even though he never directly engaged in them.
