auguste rodin

Auguste Rodin (born François-Auguste-René Rodin; November 12, 1840 – November 17, 1917) was a French sculptor, and one of the eminent sculptors of the modern era. He played a pivotal role in the art of the late nineteenth century, both excelling at and rebelling against the Beaux-Arts tradition. His work redefined sculpture at a time when painters such as Cézanne and Monet were redefining painting through Impressionism. Possessing an ability to organize a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface, he set himself apart from the predominant figure sculpture tradition of the time.

Biography

Rodin was born in 1840 into a working-class family in Paris, the son of Marie Cheffer and Jean-Baptiste Rodin, a police official. He was largely self-educated,^[1] and began to draw at ten. At 14, he attended "la Petite École", a school specializing in art and mathematics. There, he studied drawing with Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran and painting with Belloc. Rodin submitted a clay model of a companion to the École des Beaux-Arts in 1857 in an attempt to win entrance. He did not succeed, and two further applications were also denied.^[2][3] Instead, he attended Paris's School of Decorative Arts between 1854 and 1857, and studied with sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux. For much of the next two decades, Rodin earned a living as a craftsman and ornamenter, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments.

Rodin's sister Maria died in 1862; she had been in a convent, and Rodin likewise attempted to join a Christian order. He was soon dissuaded by its father superior, so he returned to work as a decorator, while taking classes with animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. His teacher's attention to surface detail significantly influenced Rodin.^[4] Rodin began to live with a young seamstress named Rose Beuret in 1864—the same year he offered his first sculpture for exhibition—and he entered the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, where he worked as an assistant until 1870. The two travelled to Brussels in 1871,^[5] where Rodin partnered with Van Rasbourg, a Belgian sculptor, to execute sculpture for the city's bourse.^[6]

Artistic independence

Until the late 1870s, when Rodin's sculpture would be accepted on its own terms, he earned his living collaborating with recognized sculptors on public commissions, primarily memorials and neo-baroque architectural pieces in the style of Carpeaux.^[7] His two-month visit to Italy in 1875 drew him to the work of Donatello and Michelangelo.^[8] He returned to Paris in 1877.

In 1883, Rodin agreed to supervise a sculpture course for Alfred Boucher during his absence, where he met the 18-year-old sculptress Camille Claudel. The two formed a passionate relationship and influenced each other artistically. Claudel inspired Rodin as a model for many of his figures, including Thought (1886-89), and assisted him on an important commission, The Burghers of Calais.

Although Claudel and Rodin shared an atelier at a small old castle, Rodin refused to relinquish his ties to Rose Beuret, his loyal companion during his years of poverty in Belgium, and birth-mother of his son Auguste-Eugène Beuret (born January 18, 1866). He never fulfilled a contract with Claudel to give up all contact with other women, and marry her. The couple parted in 1898.^[9]

By 1900, Rodin's artistic reputation was entrenched. Private clients sought smaller sculptures from him, and his assistants at the atelier made duplicates of his works. At the 1900 World's Fair (Exposition Universelie) in Paris, Rodin convinced some wealthy clients to finance a pavilion to display 165 pieces of his art. With this exposure, he received requests to make busts of prominent people internationally.^[10] In 1905 and 1906, the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke stayed with Rodin and did some administrative work for him; he would later write a monograph on the sculptor.

Art

Aesthetic

Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression than with character and emotion. Departing with centuries of tradition, he turned away from the abstraction and idealism of the Greeks, and the decorative beauty of the Baroque and neo-Baroque movements. His sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, and suggested emotions through attention to surface details, such as the interplay of light and shadow.

Rodin's talent for surface modeling allowed him to let every part of the body speak for the whole. The passion of the male in The Kiss is suggested by how his toes grip the rock, by the rigidness of his back, and by the differentiation of his hands.^[4] Speaking of The Thinker, Rodin illuminated his aesthetic:

What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes.^[11]

Rodin saw suffering and conflict as hallmarks of modern art. "Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened beast, dying from unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its passion."^[12]

Output

The overwhelming popularity of Rodin's most famous sculptures tends to mask his total creative output. A prolific artist, he created thousands of busts, figures, and sculptural fragments over more than five decades. He painted in oils (especially in his thirties) and in watercolors. The Musée Rodin holds 7,000 of his drawings.^[13]

Portraiture was an important component of Rodin's oeuvre, helping him to win acceptance and financial independence.^[14] His first sculpture was a bust of his father in 1860, and he produced at least 56 portraits between 1877 and his death in 1917.^[15] Early subjects included fellow sculptor Jules Dalou (1883) and companion Camille Claudel (1884). Later, with his artistic reputation entrenched, Rodin made busts of prominent contemporaries like Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1906), Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1909), and French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1911).

Important works

In 1864, Rodin submitted his first sculpture for exhibition, titled The Man with the Broken Nose, to the Paris Salon. The subject was an eldery neighbourhood street porter. This bronze piece was not a traditional bust, but instead the head was "broken off" at the neck, and the nose was flattened and crooked. The Salon rejected it, but this early work already illustrated the "unfinishedness" that would characterize much of Rodin's art.^[16]

Another early work, The Age of Bronze, created after his trip to Italy, was shown at the Paris Salon in 1877. The figure of the nude man looked so realistic that Rodin was accused of having taken a cast from a living model.^[8] Rodin was eventually exonerated by a committee of sculptors, and The Age of Bronze was purchased by the state.

A commission to create a portal for the planned Museum of Decorative Arts was awarded to Rodin in 1880.^[7] Although the museum was never built, Rodin worked throughout his life on elements of this monumental sculptural group, The Gates of Hell, depicting scenes from Dante's Inferno in high relief. Many of his best-known sculptures started as designs of figures for this monumental composition,^[4] such as The Thinker (Le Penseur), The Three Shades (Les Trois Ombres), and The Kiss (Le Baiser), and only later presented as separate and independent works.

The Thinker (Le Penseur, originally titled The Poet, after Dante) was to become one of the most well-known sculptures in the world.^[10][17] The original was a 27.5 inch-high bronze piece created between 1879 and 1889, designed for the Gates' lintel. Its subject is an abstracted figure engaged in intense thought, hand on chin, possibly representing Dante observing the scenes of the Inferno. Aspects of the Biblical Adam, the mythological Prometheus,^[7] and Rodin himself^[10][12] have also been ascribed to The Thinker.

Other well-known works derived from The Gates are the Ugolino group, Fugitive Love, The Falling Man, The Sirens, Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone, Damned Women, The Standing Fauness, The Kneeling Fauness, The Martyr, She Who Once Was the Beautiful Helmetmaker's Wife, Glaucus, Polyphem.

Rodin unveiled The Burghers of Calais, a 2-ton bronze work, in 1895. During the Hundred Years' War, the army of King Edward III besieged the French town of Calais. Edward is said to have asked for six citizens of the town to deliver to him the keys to the city, or the townspeople would be killed. The sculpture depicts these men as they are leaving for the king's camp, expecting to die for their community. The chronicles of the siege on Calais by Jean Froissart inspired Rodin's creation of this piece.^[18]

Commissioned to create a monument to French writer Victor Hugo in 1889, Rodin dealt extensively with the subject of artist and muse, reflecting the various aspects of his stormy and complex relationship with Claudel in The Poet and Love, The Genius and Pity, and The Sculptor and his Muse. Like many of Rodin's public commissions, Monument to Victor Hugo met with resistance because it did not fit conventional expectations. The 1897 plaster model was not cast in bronze until 1964.

His Monument to Balzac, exhibited in plaster at the 1898 salon at the Champ des Mars showing the writer in his morning frock, was also repudiated. The negative reaction was not surprising: the preliminary maquette for the sculpture shows Balzac nude, his hands clutching his genitals, a gesture whose significance is not completely lost beneath the ample drapery of the finished monument.^[10] Rodin's intent had been to show Balzac at the moment of conceiving a work.^[6] The monument was not cast in bronze during Rodin's lifetime. After this experience, Rodin did not finish any public commissions.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, then president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers, invited Rodin to display his work at the Society's 1898 exhibition. Some of the pieces proposed by Rodin did not find favour with Whistler, and several works sustained damage while in transit. After Whistler's death in 1903, Rodin was elected president of the Society. His election to the prestigious position was largely due to the efforts of Albert Ludovici (the father of English philosopher Anthony Ludovici).

Method

Instead of copying traditional academic postures, Rodin preferred to work with amateur models, street performers, acrobats, strong men and dancers. In the atelier, his models moved about and took positions without artifice.^[4] The sculptor made quick sketches in clay that were later fine-tuned, cast in plaster, and forged into bronze or carved in marble. Rodin was fascinated by dance and spontaneous movement; his John the Baptist shows a walking preacher, displaying two phases of the same stride simultaneously. Although Rodin used several models for some of his sculptures, Camille Claudel is thought to be the main model for several of his works. Through his method of marcottage (layering), he used the same sculptural elements time and time again, under different names and in different combinations.

As France's best-known sculptor, he had a large staff of pupils, craftsmen, and stone cutters working for him, including the Czech sculptors Josef Maratka and Joseph Kratina. He created a number of society portrait busts, especially for wealthy American collectors, and began presenting fragmentary sculptures, which in his opinion contained the essence of his artistic statement, like Meditation without Arms, Iris, Messenger of the Gods and The Walking Man.

Disliking formal pedestals, Rodin placed his subjects around rough rock to emphasize their quality of being real and with the viewer.

Later years

After the turn of the century, Rodin was a regular visitor to Great Britain, where he developed a stellar reputation by the beginning of the First World War. The poet William Ernest Henley was most responsible for Rodin's reception in Britain.^[19] Encouraged by the enthusiasm of British artists, students, and high society for his art, in 1914 he donated a significant selection of his works to the nation.

During his later creative years, Rodin's work turned increasingly toward the female form, and themes of more overt masculinity and femininity.^[10] He concentrated on small dance studies (ca. 1915), and produced numerous erotic drawings, sketched in a loose way, without taking his pencil from the paper or his eyes from the model. A 1906 exhibition of these drawings in Weimar caused the so-called Kessler scandal, in which Harry Count Kessler was dismissed as curator of the Weimar Museum.

On January 29, 1917, Rodin finally married Rose Beuret; she died two weeks later, on February 16.^[20] Rodin was ill that year; in January, he suffered weakness from influenza,^[21] and on November 16 his physician said that "[c]ongestion of the lungs has caused great weakness. The patient's condition is grave."^[20] Rodin died the following day, age 77, at his villa in Meudon, Île-de-France, on the outskirts of Paris.^[2] A cast of The Thinker was placed next to his tomb in Meudon.

Criticism

The aesthetic that Rodin brought to sculpture created controversy in his time. Early in his career, his first piece had been rejected by the Salon. Even as a prominent international artist, his commissions sometimes met with disapproval. The statue of Balzac requested by the Société des Gens des Lettres, a Parisian organization of writers, was refused in 1898. In criticizing the work, Morey (1918) reflected, "there may come a time, and doubtless will come a time, when it will not seem outre to represent a great novelist as a huge comic mask crowning a bathrobe, but even at the present day this statue impresses one as slang." Indeed, a recent critic indicates that Balzac is considered one of Rodin's masterpieces.^[22]

Commenting on Rodin's momument to Victor Hugo, The Times in 1909 expressed that "there is some show of reason in the complaint that [Rodin's] conceptions are sometimes unsuited to his medium, and that in such cases they overstrain his vast technical powers".^[23] Shortly after his death, the paper noted that Rodin had been accused of ignorance of the human form.^[6]

Legacy

Even before his death, Rodin was compared to Michelangelo,^[12] and was widely recognized as the greatest artist of the era.^[24] In the three decades following his death, his popularity waned due to changing aesthetic values. Since the 1950s, Rodin's reputation has ascended; he has been recognized as the most important sculptor of the modern era, and has been the subject of much scholarly work.^[24][25] Despite his impact on art, he has not spawned a significant, lasting school of followers.

Rodin restored an ancient role of sculpture—to capture the physical and intellectual force of the human subject.^[25] His popularity is ascribed to his emotion-laden representations of ordinary men and women—to his ability to find the beauty and pathos in the human animal. His most popular works, such as The Kiss and The Thinker, are widely used outside the fine arts as symbols of human emotion and character.^[26]

Locations of works

Because the sculptor encouraged the reproduction of his work, Rodin's sculptures are represented in many collections. For example, The Burghers of Calais—whose duplication was limited only after Rodin's death, to 12 copies— is found in 14 cities.^[18] The Musée Rodin in Paris, founded in 1919, holds the largest Rodin collection.

• Musée Khalil, Giza, Egypt
• Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany
• Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States
• University of Louisville, Louisville, Kentucky, United States
• Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland, United States - The Thinker
• Boulevard Raspail, near Boulevard Montparnasse, in the 6th arrondissement of Paris - a statue of Honoré de Balzac
• Brooklyn Museum Cantor Gift, Brooklyn, New York, United States
• Calais Hotel de Ville - The Burghers of Calais
• California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, California, United States
• Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, Michigan, United States
• Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia
• Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, Russia
• High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, United States
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, United States
• Maryhill Museum of Art, Maryhill, Washington, United States
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, United States
• Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas - Eve
• National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., United States
• National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia
• National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan
• Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California, United States - The Burghers of Calais
• Rodin Museum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States - Largest Rodin collection outside of Paris
• Stanford University, Sculpture Garden, Palo Alto, California, United States
• Trammell Crow Center, Dallas, Texas
• Vatican Museums, Rome, Italy
• Victoria Tower Gardens, Palace of Westminster, London, United Kingdom - The Burghers of Calais
• the World Room, Journalism Hall, Columbia University, United States - a bust of Joseph Pulitzer

Notes