Torso

Auguste Rodin

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This bronze cast preserves the aggressiveness with which Rodin could attack his clay figures. He tore and gouged the torso with his hands and sliced at its arms and thigh with wire. Contemporary critics often decried these acts as "mutilations" of the human body and considered them direct assaults on artistic ideals. But in such fragments Rodin sought to achieve an aesthetic beauty that was heroic and complete, saying of another work, "Don’t you see I left it in that state intentionally?" Rodin displayed a large-scale plaster cast of this composition at his 1889 joint exhibition with Monet at Galerie Georges Petit in Paris. He later reused a version of Torso to create The Walking Man.

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.

Metropolitan Museum of Art