Dartmouth Events

The Department of Art History and Leslie Center for the Humanities will welcome Alex Potts, Professor Emeritus, Max Loehr Collegiate Professor in History of Art, University of Michigan for a public lecture titled, "Figuration in Modern Sculpture - the Worker, the Thinker"

The talk’s title is inspired by alighting on an intriguing juxtaposition of work by two fin-de-siécle artists seen in their time as leading masters of modern sculpture, the famous seated Thinker by Rodin, and a similarly posed puddler, a worker in the steel industry, by the Belgian artist Constantin Meunier. These artists were celebrated for realizing, each in their own way, a revitalised sculptural figuration that broke with the stale classicising academicism seen to dominate sculpture as an art form.  In Rodin’s case, it was by formal commitment to radical anti-academic innovation, paralleling the efforts of avant-garde painters such as the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, in Meunier’s, by transforming the social basis of sculpture, tackling working class subjects previously largely excluded from sculptural representation. Their figurations spoke to two quite different registers of modern cultural sensibility. In Rodin’s work, impassioned striving alternated with spasms of suffering, ecstatic erotic yearning with inner recoil and collapse, most spectacularly in the multitude of figures populating his Gates of Hell. Meunier’s proletarian figures, on the other hand, evoked an unstable conflation of inner strength and integrity and subjection to the oppressive conditions of modern proletarian life and laboring, an instability that might tip over into a capacity to rebel.