Rodin: rethinking the fragment at Abbot Hall
Creative Tourist
One of Auguste Rodin’s most famous works will go on show at Abbot Hall Art Gallery in Cumbria this summer.
The Thinker is on loan from the Burrell Collection in Glasgow and takes centre stage in this display which explores how the French sculptor (1840-1917) studied the fragments of ancient Greece and Rome, converting the limbless, headless torso into a new art genre. Rodin was a radical and innovative artist who challenged the rules of contemporary sculpture. Perhaps his most important legacy was the idea that a fragment – an incomplete figure or even an isolated hand – could be a work of art in its own right.
