Bridge over troubled water

Spectator, The, Jul 22, 2006 by Glazebrook, Mark

Rodin was a modeller who worked swiftly in clay, content to have others carve marble versions of certain works. His plaster bust of Clemenceau is outstanding in this show, as are the bronze busts of Baudelaire, Hugo and Mahler. The controversial Balzac monument is memorable.

Rodin was a superb portraitist with a deep love and knowledge of literature and all the arts. He was also a great draughtsman who saw drawing as the absolutely essential key to his work. Rodin made many different sorts of drawing. Some emphasise volume. Others are light and sensitive, in pencil and watercolour, brilliantly capturing the fleeting movement of dancers.

His drawings for figures within the 'Gates of Hell' are appropriately dark. In making them Rodin grappled with architecture and the problem of relating his figures to mouldings. The 'Gates of Hell' were commissioned by the French Directorate of Fine Arts for a museum that was never built. It became not so much a sculpture, more a mode of life in which Dante led the way. It has survived as a maquette and has spawned a host of single breakaway sculptures, including 'The Thinker' and 'The Kiss'.

There could never be a definitive Rodin retrospective. He was too prolific an artist and too deep, too unfathomable, a man for that. Rodin in Istanbul is large but it is so stimulating that it left me longing to experience more. When the Royal Academy's Rodin show opens in London on 25 September this year, there will be an overlap between the two shows. Bronzes come in multiple editions. It is a measure of Rodin's amazing fecundity, combined with the special relationship which the British enjoyed with the French master, that London's exhibition will be a very different one from Rodin in Istanbul. Edward VII, W.E. Henley, Robert Louis Stevenson and Gwen John, one of his four principal mistresses (the others being Rose Beuret, Camille Claudel and the Duchesse de Choiseul), come into the story.

As the Istanbul exhibition proceeds, a feeling of Rodin's greatness grows and grows. It's not so much about perfection as the very human struggle for perfection.

Aspects of Muslim culture famously inspired European artists such as Delacroix and Matisse on visits from France to North Africa. The pollen of cultural cross-fertilisation can blow two ways.