Auguste Rodin, the Michelangelo of modern sculpture, and Gustav Klimt, the great 20th-century Austrian symbolist painter and founder of the modernist Vienna Secession movement, met only once, in 1902.
Klimt was already well on his way to becoming one of the highest-paid painters of his day when Rodin, then at the height of his international fame, visited the 14th Secession exhibition in the Austrian capital that year. Their second meeting, a reunion if you will, is currently taking place at the Legion of Honor in "Klimt & Rodin: An Artistic Encounter." While both men were certainly titans of 20th-century art, and 2017 marks the centenary of their deaths, the show doesn't advance a particularly convincing case for the pairing or adequately deliver on a promised dialogue between their artworks.
Over the past year, the Legion has displayed portions of its extensive Rodin collection in conversation with works by other artists, but the exhibit featuring Klimt has been the most eagerly anticipated. Be advised: there are a mere 35 of his landscapes, portraits and drawings here, and those don't include the splendid golden masterpieces for which he's most famous: the sublime "Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer-1" (1907) (for that, you'll have to travel to Neue Galerie in New York) and "The Kiss" (1907-08), an achingly erotic, sumptuous depiction of tender lovers cloaked in byzantine gold and mosaic.
Because of their fragility, the astronomical cost of insurance and lenders' reluctance to part with them, Klimt's works rarely travel, making their first appearance in California, however sparse the selection, a cause for celebration. After getting beyond what's missing and yearning for more, there's much that's lovely to behold. It's also an occasion to contrast two temperamentally, very different masters.
The prolific Rodin was a showman and relentless self-promoter whose studio was a stage where he greeted friends and patrons, posed for photographs and employed as many as 50 assistants, while Klimt, who toiled in virtual solitude, constantly altered and never quite finished many of the 245 artworks he produced before his premature death at 55, an output Picasso could have matched in the space of a year.
Women were central to the art of both men - as lovers, patrons and subjects. Rodin was as magnetized by female sitters such as Miss Eve Fairfax, whose delicate beauty and aristocratic bearing he memorialized in white marble, as he was oppressed by the demands of multiple mistresses. Two sculptures attest, quite literally, to his vexing struggles with the opposite sex. In "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" (before 1900), the holy man desperately kisses his cross as the naked woman wrapped around his back wrestles him to the ground; and the determined female standing on a man's thigh in the bronze "The Sculptor and his Muse" (1890s) has grabbed him by the balls, a possible reference to the artist's fraught breakup with Camille Claudel.
Klimt didn't marry, and despite his success never moved out of his mother's house, a domestic situation that apparently didn't interfere with his fathering 14 children by various paramours and maintaining a relationship with fashion designer Emilie Floge, his lifetime companion and confidante. He paid tribute to their deep, abiding connection in a 1902/03 portrait - unfortunately, not in the show - that reveres her long, lithe frame clothed in an ornate chiffon evening dress dusted with metallic silver and gold. He's said to have abruptly canceled a date with Floge to attend a party honoring Rodin's 1902 visit.
Though Rodin created sensual renderings of both genders, Klimt was, above all, a painter of women. Elegant, posh and circulating in the rarefied orbit of Viennese high society, his stylish creatures seem not quite of this world, like the tall, cool drinks of water depicted in vertical planes in two lyrical works. The exquisitely slender Gertrud Loew was 19 in 1902 when Klimt painted her as part of a series on women in white inspired by James Whistler. Soft with upswept brown hair and a penetrating gaze, she's a spectral vision in a pale, flowing diaphanous dress trimmed with blue grosgrain ribbon. The equally willowy "Ria Munk III" (1917) merges with a profusion of divinely colored flowers as if she herself were a delectable bloom lovingly cultivated by an attentive gardener. Klimt woos us with lush femininity in the beautifully balanced "Portrait of Sonja Knips" (1898), whose life-sized subject, in light pink tulle, is the epitome of refinement. Offset by darkness of nightfall, she's poised on the edge of an upholstered chair wearing a dress - chosen by Klimt - with cinched waist and full skirt. One can almost hear the crunch and rustle of the crisp fabric.
No one should depart the museum without ducking into a side gallery containing the artists' explicit erotic works on paper, which were controversial in their own time, and still are today. And no wonder. There's an unmistakable scent of sex in Klimt's "Reclining Nude Propped up on her Left Elbow" (1908/09), where a woman is curled in bed with her head slightly turned away, a pose that exposes her ample breasts, and "Lying Nude with Spread Legs" (1917-18), which speaks for itself. They're shown on the same wall as a female on all fours by Rodin, and his version of a spread-eagle contortionist. In his lifetime, Rodin completed over 10,000 drawings, the key, he once said, to understanding his entire body of work.
For those left mourning the absence of "Adele," with its intricate patterning and panoply of color, there's some solace in "The Virgin" (1913), a painting of intertwined women nestled under a kaleidoscopic coverlet, floating away on the wings of a Chagallesque dream.
Through Jan. 28.
Through Jan. 28. legionofhonor.famsf.org