Today I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the Rodin Exhibition. It was my first time ever visiting this museum, and for the future I would like to tour the whole museum and take in everything it has to offer. The exhibition has plenty of paintings and some sculptures made out of plaster or terracotta. One particular sculpture I enjoyed was named Beside the Sea. It was a nude woman with her back hunched over. I found it to be quite peaceful since she seemed to be calm and in the middle of drifting her hand across soft sand. Another interesting sculpture was the Head of Balzac. This sculpture was a man’s head made of bronze. This head portrayed exhausted, and perhaps irritable emotions. This sculpture was very different compared to Beside the Sea because this one emphasized the man’s agitated brow, pug nose, and a mouth that looked like he just tasted something bitter. I learned that Rodin used different techniques for drawing such as the drypoint technique which is where you use a needle directly on a metal plate to draw. He also used watercolors from time to time to convey a sense of energy such as in his painting The Embrace. One painting that caught my eye was The Abandoned where a woman lay on a bed, covered in bed sheets with a melancholy look on her face. I enjoyed having the opportunity to visit this museum, and I can’t wait to go again!
