Tate’s bizarrely censorious attitude does a disservice to The Making of Rodin

Two lovers are snogging on a landing at Tate Modern. Athletic, slim, they make an attractive couple – you’d have to be, to strip off beneath those neon lights. Almost everyone adores The Kiss, that sleek sublimation of carnal infatuation by the French artist Auguste Rodin (1840–1917).

Apart, that is, from its creator. To him, it was nothing but “a large sculpted knick-knack, following the usual formula”. Too sentimental, perhaps; certainly too conventional. Is ambivalence detectable in the gallery’s new exhibition, The Making of Rodin? I’d say. At times, this serious, accomplished show seems almost apologetic that it’s happening at all.

While a big, recent Rodin exhibition at the British Museum confirmed how much this working-class son of a police inspector engaged with the art of ancient Greece, Tate’s show, The Making of Rodin, featuring more than 200 works, emphasises his “radical” modernity. (Straddling the 19th and 20th centuries, Rodin has always been the Janus of art history.) It’s inspired by a retrospective that Rodin himself mounted in Paris in 1900, at a specially constructed pavilion at the Place de l’Alma, to coincide with the Universal Exhibition. Instead of marbles and bronzes, he displayed plaster casts, to evoke the tumult of his studio.

After a prologue focusing on The Age of Bronze, Rodin’s astonishingly supple likeness of a young Belgian soldier, we encounter a panoply of plasters. Look at all these spectral apparitions of Rodin’s greatest hits. Versions of his Thinker, a contortionist preparing to squeeze into a box. His monument to a priapic, pot-bellied Balzac, draped in a dressing gown. And the headless, armless Walking Man, his carcass gouged, like Monty Python’s Black Knight: ’tis but a scratch. Later, we meet the artist’s withered, drooping Burghers of Calais, plodding to the scaffold.

There are also watercolour drawings, and dramatic, proto-surreal photographs, taken by Eugène Druet, who owned a café across the street from Rodin’s studio, of agonised, disembodied hands, like the blackened mitts of Tollund Man. Meanwhile, Tate’s version of The Kiss, in Pentelic marble, sits beside a fire exit on the concourse outside the show, for loved-up teens to swoon over. Rodin’s smooching couple should get a room.

Against white walls, the plasters can disappear, as camouflaged as an Arctic fox in winter. Still, the exhibition delivers on its intention, to summon the artist’s creative process. Up close, the plasters are blotchy, discoloured, pockmarked with tiny air bubbles. Joins are visible, where parts have been fused together, so that busts resemble phrenology heads. Graphite marks are scrawled on surfaces. Nails protrude. Nothing feels idealised or timeless. Rather, these are in-the-moment records of Rodin’s hand.

Or is it the hand of somebody else? Typically, Rodin worked on clay or terracotta models, from which casters would make multiple plaster proofs. These were, in turn, used to tempt clients to pay for an expensive version in, say, bronze, also fabricated by a technician. Keeping up with the minutiae of Rodin’s methods requires concentration. There’s a lot of emphasis on tricks of the trade, such as his habit of softening sculptures by dipping them in lait de platre, or plaster slip.

A case contains dozens of tiny casts of arms and hands, individually modelled and stockpiled by Rodin, who called them “abattis” (giblets). When the mood took him, he’d pick one out, and combine it with other elements to create a new composition. Think of it as the Airfix school of modern art. Rodin had a thing for hands, producing thousands over his career. They’re a bit creepy, these giblets, like souvenirs hoarded by a serial killer. Arguably, too, they reinforce the impression of a show of sketches, studio offcuts, half-formed ideas. Odds and sods from the back of the plan chest.

There’s a pedantic insistence on naming Rodin’s assistants, models, and collaborators. The general idea seems to be to debunk the myth of individual genius, by demonstrating how much Rodin relied on, even exploited, others. It’s a bit like that scene in The Wizard of Oz, when Toto pulls back the curtain to reveal a pathetic old man operating a control panel. Except, in Rodin’s case, the contraption is an enlarging machine called a pantograph. Art is demystified, shown to be humbug.

At points, the tone even turns censorious. A section examines Rodin’s “appropriation” of antiquities, which he collected. A small plaster sylph emerges from an Etruscan vessel, like a rabbit springing from a hat. Naughty Rodin, scolds a stern wall text: arrêtez! In creating something new, he was “effectively destroying” an ancient artefact. Even the turn-of-the-century antiquities trade gets it in the neck, enabled, we’re told, by “European colonisation”. Since when did Tate’s curators care so much about Roman amphorae and Boeotian cups?

Rodin’s most egregious offence, though, is his attitude towards women. Wall texts stand up for individual models and lovers. When it comes, though, to a display of frankly erotic graphite-and-watercolour studies of naked female models, whom Rodin directed to move freely around the studio: uh-oh. The relationship between artist and model, we’re told, was “starkly unequal, and Rodin did not identify these women, or personalise their nude bodies.”

Having failed, three times, to gain admission to the école des Beaux-Arts, Rodin now “fails” to observe contemporary mores. Enough with the finger-wagging. If you don’t like the work, don’t show it. The trouble with all the tutting is that it acts as a buzzkill. We arrive expecting Rodin to be the exhibition’s hero. By the end, he’s the villain of the piece.

From May 18 until Nov 21. Info: tate.org.uk