The Making of Rodin review – not a radical, just a plain old genius

The daylight streams in through Tate Modern’s big windows perfectly illuminating the novelist Balzac. His face is angry and stern, his body swathed in a massive, shapeless gown. This lack of defined form is exactly what horrified Parisians when Rodin’s full-sized plaster model for a monument was unveiled in 1898.

For the novelist and art critic Émile Zola, Rodin was the perfect artist to make a monument to the sprawling chronicler of politics and modern life, and he helped him get this prestigious commission. But when Rodin exhibited the model, all hell broke loose. Looking at its bizarre presence, I see why Rodin could be regarded as the founder of modern sculpture.

Before 1898, the art of sculpture was about depicting the human body. Since ancient Greek times, European artists had studied anatomy and sought to show the muscles and movements of accurate human forms. But Balzac hasn’t got a body. He’s got a giant dressing gown instead. To underline how strange his inflated balloon of a structure is, this show includes a study in which Rodin has literally made a statue of an empty dressing gown, sans head, just with feet to stand on. Rodin’s Balzac is a surrealist statue, 36 years before the movement’s manifesto. Its eerie concealment of the writer’s flesh beneath a garment, so he becomes a phantom in his own clothes, anticipates Man Ray’s The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse – a sewing machine wrapped in a blanket and tied with rope.

That is this exhibition’s argument, in a slightly pretentious nutshell. Rodin, it insists, is an artist who belongs here, in Tate Modern. He’s the ancestor of Duchamp and Warhol, obsessed with “the fragment”, “appropriation” and “repetition”. To make this point, the curators have ransacked the Rodin Museum in Paris for its oddest, most uncanny relics – mostly plaster casts, including a severed foot on a pedestal, disembodied hands and a series of flights of fancy in which Rodin places small nudes inside antique ceramic pots as if they were having a bath.

It took Rodin a while to find fame and success. Born poor in 1840, he failed to get into the École des Beaux-Arts and instead learned his skills working as an assistant in workshops across France and Belgium. His male nude The Age of Bronze – which opens Tate Modern’s beautiful if intellectually confused show – made his name yet also caused controversy. It was so real he was accused of casting it from his model instead of using artistic talent.

In 1880 he started The Gates of Hell, a cascading vision of the tormented sinners from Dante’s Inferno, for which he devised many of his most iconic forms – including The Thinker, of which this show has a stupendous cast. As you enter the exhibition, you meet his marble statue The Kiss, a treasure of the Tate that started as a portrait of adulterers in the Inferno.

But the very things this show claims are most 20th- or 21st-century about Rodin are typical of his own age. The factory-like system he employed of churning out plaster models and bronze casts of his designs was not a radical anticipation of today’s “multiple”. It was very Victorian. In an era when no middle-class home was complete without busts of famous people on the mantlepiece, mass-produced statuary was popular. There’s a vivid account of such workshops in the Sherlock Holmes story The Adventure of the Six Napoleons.

So it’s not surprising that Rodin, with his experience of craft workshops, conceived of sculpture as a kind of industry. It doesn’t make him Jeff Koons. Rodin liked to sculpt in clay, shaping forms in his hands. From those clay originals, everything else flowed. Skilled employees helped him create plaster casts, and a device called a pantograph allowed him to calculate the dimensions of dramatically enlarged or reduced casts. A dreamlike example here is a colossally enlarged head of one of The Burghers of Calais. Then he commissioned carvers to reproduce them in marble and founders to cast them in bronze.

Unfortunately, the exhibition doesn’t explore this complex process. It instead obsesses about the plaster casts. It is best enjoyed in a purely aesthetic way, for any attempt to engage with its arguments is futile. Yet theory can’t repress his genius. The ways he played with reproduction to get his ideas across are not the point of his art – what matters is the expressiveness of his vision. Rodin displays that everywhere. His imagination is so bold, so daring. One marble piece that’s included depicts two female nymphs making love. Next to it are steamy watercolours of women bathing in blue water.

You have to hand it to the curators. They don’t hold back. Yet Rodin the modernist keeps coming up against Rodin the medievalist. The problem with removing biographical context or iconographic meaning, and just giving us an aesthetic splurge of weird plaster casts, is that it can seriously misrepresent his art. A group of writhing figures cavort in agony on top of a Renaissance-style plinth. Is this a kinky bit of sado-masochism? No, it’s an attempt to visualise the most distressing tale in Dante’s Inferno, that of Count Ugolino and his children, who were starved to death in a dungeon.

Without that story, Rodin’s sculpture is robbed of its purpose. Similarly, we see bits of The Burghers of Calais – a giant head, a contorted hand – turned into curios. But they’re just working studies, and seem trivial compared with the full-sized plaster cast of The Burghers. Here is a monument to a group of 14th-century volunteers who were ready to sacrifice themselves to the English to save their town.

Those hands, those heads – they move in passionate synchrony, in a sculpture that is like a requiem mass. Rodin is not modern or ancient. He’s eloquent, direct and simple.