Alexandra Gerstein

The Courtauld is one of the United Kingdom’s great art collections, displayed throughout the magnificent historic setting of Somerset House in central London. This elegant book is a curated selection of its highlights — paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture and decorative arts — each beautifully illustrated and accompanied by an insightful commentary. Notable among these treasures are remarkable Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings, including the world-famous A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet and Vincent van Gogh’s Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. This book is also an engaging account of how The Courtauld became an internationally renowned centre for the teaching and research of art history, conservation and curating. It was founded nearly a century ago in the belief that art has the power to enrich people’s lives. The Courtauld continues that mission today, promoting the understanding of the visual arts and offering a place where everyone can find enjoyment and inspiration.

Rodin & Dance: The Essence of Movement is the first serious study of Rodin’s late sculptural series known as the Dance Movements. Exploring the artist’s fascination with dance and bodies in extreme acrobatic poses, the exhibition and accompanying catalogue give an account of Rodin’s passion for new forms of dance – from south-asian dances to the music hall and the avant garde – which began appearing on the French stage around 1900. Rodin made hundreds of drawings and watercolors of dancers. From about 1911 he also gave sculptural expression to this fascination with dancers’ bodies and movements in creating the Dance Movements, a series of small clay figure studies (each approx. 30 cm in height) that stretch and twist in unsettling ways. These leaping, turning figures in terracotta and plaster were not exhibited during Rodin’s lifetime or known beyond his close circle, and were only cast in bronze posthumously. Presented alongside the associated drawings and photographs of some of the dancers, they show a new side to Rodin’s art, in which he pushed the boundaries of sculpture, expressing themes of flight and gravity. This exhibition catalogue aims to become the authoritative reference for Rodin’s Dance Movements, comprising essays from leading scholars in the field of sculpture. It will include an introductory essay on the history of the bronze casting of the Dance Movements and the critical fortune of the series, an essay on the dancers Rodin admired, and an extensive technical essay. The Catalogue will comprise detailed entries on the works in the exhibition and new technical information on the drawings. Contributors include Alexandra Gerstein, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Courtauld Gallery; Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Director, Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, Paris; Juliet Bellow, Associate Professor of Art History, American University in Washington, DC and currently Resident Fellow, the Center for Ballet and the Arts, New York University; François Blanchetière, Curator of Sculpture at the Musée Rodin with sculpture conservators Agnès Cascio and Juliette Lévy; Sophie Biass-Fabiani, Curator of Works on Paper at the Musée Rodin; Kate Edmondson, Conservator of Works on Paper at The Courtauld Gallery; and Aline Magnien, Director of the Laboratoire de Recherche des Monuments Historiques.