The Hilliard Art Museum is proud to announce the opening of a monumental exhibition RODIN: TOWARD MODERNITY in celebration of the Museum’s 20th Anniversary. The exhibition will debut on Friday, October 25th, 2024.
RODIN: TOWARD MODERNITY will include 40 bronze sculptures by Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), regarded during his lifetime as the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo. Selected from the collections of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation and the North Carolina Museum of Art, the exhibition will include many of the French sculptor's most well-known works, including “The Burghers of Calais”, “The Kiss” and studies for his largest commission, “The Gates of Hell,” as well as Honoré de Balzac and St. John the Baptist.
“RODIN: TOWARD MODERNITY is a unique opportunity for University of Louisiana at Lafayette students and the community to see some of the most important art created in the last 130 years,” says Ben Hickey, curator of the exhibition. “Auguste Rodin combined a deep respect for artists who came before him with a forward looking sensibility to create an oeuvre that influenced greats like Constantin Brâncuș, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. His work with fragments still informs a great deal of sculptural discourse in the twenty-first century.
The exhibition's centerpiece will be a grouping of one of Rodin’s best-known sculptures, "The Burghers of Calais”. In 1885 the town council of the French city of Calais commissioned Rodin to produce a sculpture that would pay tribute to the burghers of Calais, heroes of the Hundred Years’ War, and symbols of French patriotism.
In 1347, according to the fourteenth-century Chronicles of Jean Froissart, King Edward III of England laid siege to the French town of Calais. After eleven months, with the people desperately short of food and water, six of the leading citizens, or burghers, of Calais offered themselves as hostages to Edward in exchange for the freedom of their city. The king agreed, ordering them to dress in plain garments, wear nooses around their necks, and journey to his camp bearing the keys to the city. Although the king intended to kill the burghers, his pregnant wife, Philippa, persuaded him to spare them, believing that their deaths would be a bad omen for her unborn child.
Rodin chose to portray the moment in the narrative when the men, believing they were going to die, left the city. He showed the burghers as vulnerable and conflicted, yet heroic in the face of their likely fate. [excerpted from John Jolliffe, ed. and trans., Froissart’s Chronicles (London: Harvill Press, 1967), p. 155, quoted in Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, p. 182]
Special thanks to The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation and the North Carolina Museum of Art.
Exhibition Dates: October 25, 2024 — April 30, 2024 .
Museum Hours, Admission & General Information
The Hilliard Art Museum is located at 710 E. Saint Mary Blvd. on the campus of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Museum hours are Tuesday through Friday, 9 a.m.-5 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m.; closed Sunday and Monday. For general information, please visit HillliardMuseum.org or call 337-482-2278.
About the Hilliard Art Museum
Our Museum is a bridge. Our Museum is a catalyst. Our Museum is for everyone. We connect art and education, our university and our community, generations, heritage and cultures. The Hilliard Art Museum-University of Louisiana at Lafayette is not just a place to look at art. It is a place where visitors are encouraged to truly see art. It is a place of learning, where students sketch in the galleries and artists talk about their work. It is a destination for families, where kids express their own creativity through hands-on activities. And it is a resource for academic research and observation. Museum experiences build skills that extend into every aspect of life. Viewing art promotes dialogue and understanding between individuals, among families, and throughout our community. Art makes life richer and better for everyone.
About The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation:
The Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Foundation strives to fulfill the commitment of its founders to provide philanthropic leadership in two principal arenas, medicine and the arts. It does so by awarding grants for programs, facilities and endowments at distinguished medical, educational and cultural institutions in the United States and internationally. In the medical arena, the Foundation supports institutions at the forefront of biomedical research and clinical care, with an emphasis on healthcare for women. In the arts, the Foundation supports exhibitions and other programs that encourage recognition and appreciation of the visual and performing arts, promote scholarship, and otherwise enhance cultural life. Furthering the Cantor legacy in the visual arts, the Foundation’s activities in this arena continue to focus on the work of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his contemporaries. For more information, please visit www.cantorfoundation.org.
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