Everyone remembers the first time they saw a Rodin. For Leigh Robb, the curator of the Art Gallery of South Australia’s new exhibition, Versus Rodin: Bodies Across Space and Time, it happened in Calais, France. “When I was 10 years old, my mum and dad were determined that we were going to go and see The Burghers of Calais,” she recalls, “I remember it explicitly, walking around these figures looming over me, and the potency of their despair was heightened because it was pouring with rain.
Auguste Rodin, the father of modern sculpture, died 100 years ago this year. To mark the occasion, the Rodin Museum Paris — once Rodin’s workshop — has undergone a major refurbishment; its celebrated gardens spruced up, its wooden floors replaced. Constructed between 1727 and…