Exhibition
Centennial Exhibition
March 22 – July 31, 2017
Grand Palais, Pariz
The year 2017 was marked by the centenary of death of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917). The most important event is certainly the Centennial Exhibition, opened in late March at the Grand Palais in Paris.
The team of experts, led by the Director of Musée Rodin, Catherine Chevillot, and the retired Director of the French Institute of Art History, Antoinette Le Nornand-Romain, designed a large exhibition and a publishing project with a focus on Rodin’s influence on modern sculpture and other artistic media in France and the rest of the world from the end of the 19th century to the beginning of the 21st century. The extensive exhibition is set across two floors, bringing together about three hundred of Rodin’s works, as well as works of authors such as Antoine Bourdelle, Georges Braque, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Constantin Brâncuşi, Käthe Kollwitz, and Georges Baselite and Tracey Emin.
The fact that two works of Ivan Meštrović – the sculptures The Fountain of Life (Vienna, 1905) and The Old Woman (Paris, 1908), both from the holdings of Meštrović Atelier in Zagreb, were also exhibited is especially important for Croatian art history. It is a result of the collaboration between Musée Rodin and the Ivan Meštrović Museums which began in the 1960s with Meštrović’s exhibition in Paris and Rodin’s in Zagreb, and re-updated with the presentation of the Croatian sculptor at Musée Rodin (2012 – 2013), Rodin’s retrospective at the Art Pavilion in Zagreb and a small exhibition at the Meštrović Gallery in Split (2015).
