Auguste Rodin

The French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) conceived of his sculpture largely as volumes existing in space, as materials to be manipulated for a variety of surface effects. Thus he anticipated the aims of many 20th-century sculptors.

Auguste Rodin, the son of a police inspector, was born in Paris on Nov. 12, 1840. He studied drawing under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran and modeling under the sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeaux at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris (1854-1857). Simultaneously Rodin studied literature and history at the Colle‧ge de France. Rejected three times by the École des Beaux-Arts, he supported himself by doing decorative work for ornamentalists and set designers.

In 1862, as a result of the death of his sister Maria, who had joined a convent, Rodin attempted to join a Christian order, but he was dissuaded by the perceptive father superior. Rodin continued as a decorator by day and at night attended a class given by the animal sculptor Antoine Louis Barye.

In 1864 Rodin began to live with the young seamstress Rose Beuret, whom he married the last year of his life. Also in 1864 he completed his Man with a Broken Nose, a bust of an old street porter, which the Salon rejected. That year he entered the studio of Carrier-Belleuse, a sculptor who worked in the light rococo mode of the previous century. Rodin remained with Carrier-Belleuse for six years and always spoke warmly of him. In 1870 he and his teacher went to Brussels, where they began the sculptural decoration of the Bourse. The next year they quarreled, and Carrier-Belleuse returned to Paris, while Rodin completed the work under A. J. van Rasbourg.

The Human Figure

In 1875 Rodin went to Italy, where he was deeply inspired by the work of Donatello and of Michelangelo, whose sculpture he characterized as being marked by both "violence and constraint." Back in Paris in 1876, Rodin made a bronze statue of a standing man raising his arms toward his head in such a way as to project an air of uncertainty, a figure held in a pose of slight torsion suggestive of Michelangelo's Dying Slave. Rodin originally entitled the piece the Vanquished, then called it the Age of Bronze. When he submitted it to the Salon, it caused an immediate controversy, for it was so lifelike that it was believed to have been cast from the living model. The piece was unusual for the time in that it had no literary or historical connotations. After Rodin was exonerated by a committee of sculptors, the state purchased the Age of Bronze.

In 1878 Rodin began work on the St. John the Baptist Preaching and various related works, including the Walking Man. Lacking not only moral and sentimental overtones but a head and arms as well, the Walking Man was an electrifying image of forceful motion. Derived partially from some of Donatello's late works, it was based on numerous poses of the model in constant motion. Rodin raised the very act of walking into a subject worthy of concentrated study.

Rodin's interests continued to broaden. Between 1879 and 1882 he worked at ceramics, and between 1881 and 1886 he produced a number of engravings. By 1880 his fame had become international, and that year the minister of fine arts commissioned him to design a doorway for the proposed Museum of Decorative Arts. The project, called the Gates of Hell after Dante's Inferno, occupied Rodin for the rest of his life, and particularly in the next decade, but it was never finished. The Gates were cast in their incomplete state in the late 1920s.

For Rodin, the study of the human figure in a variety of poses indicative of many emotional states was a lifelong preoccupation. In the St. John the artist caught the prophet at the moment when he was moved deeply, gesturing automatically by the strength of the idea he was presenting. The gestures of Rodin's figures seem motivated by inner emotional states. In his bronze Crouching Woman (1880-1882) an almost incredibly contracted pose becomes something beyond a mere mannerism. The cramped posture of the woman suggests humility, perhaps a conviction of debasement.

One of Rodin's most ambitious conceptions was the group commissioned by the municipality of Calais as a civic monument. The Burghers of Calais (1884-1886), a group larger than life size, commemorates the episode during the Hundred Years War when a group of local citizens agreed to sacrifice their lives to save their city. The pathos and horror of the subject accord with the romantic sentiments of the time. One of the figures clutches his head, another exhorts his companion, an older man walks stoically ahead. Each of the burghers is individualized, even while they all move ahead to a common purpose. The psychological interactions of the figures were acutely observed, and a lifelike immediacy was achieved. The group was finally installed in 1895.

Portrait Busts

From the late 1880s Rodin received many commissions from private individuals for portrait busts and from the state for monuments commemorating renowned people. Most of the state commissions exist in the state of models, such as the monument to Victor Hugo (begun 1889), which was to have been placed in the Panthéon in Paris, and the monuments to James McNeill Whistler, Napoleon, and Pierre Puvis de Chavannes. Among Rodin's portrait busts are those of George Bernard Shaw, Henri Rochefort, Georges Clémenceau, and Charles Baudelaire.

In the Head of Baudelaire (1892), as in his other portraits, Rodin went beyond mere verisimilitude to catch the inner spirit. Baudelaire's face looks ahead with rapt attention, and the eyes seem to be transfixed upon something invisible. Remarkably, Rodin used as his model not Baudelaire, who had died in 1867, but a draftsman named Malteste, who, for the sculptor, had all the characteristics of the Baudelairean mask: "See the enormous forehead, swollen at the temples, dented, tormented, handsome nevertheless…."

In 1891 the Societé des Gens de Lettres commissioned Rodin to do a statue of Honoré de Balzac, a work that was subsequently rejected. It was not until 1939 that this work was placed at the Raspail-Montparnasse intersection in Paris. Here, too, Rodin went beyond the external appearance of the subject to catch the inner spirit. As is seen in a bronze of 1897, Balzac, wrapped in his dressing gown, is in the throes of inspiration. Details and articulations of the body are not indicated, all the better to call attention to the haughty yet grandiloquent pose of the inspired writer.

Almost single-handedly Rodin inaugurated the modern spirit in sculpture by freeing it from its dependence upon direct representation and conceiving of sculptural masses as abstract volumes existing in space. To conceive of his aims as being analogous to those of the impressionist painters is not entirely correct, for while the roughness of the surfaces of his sculpture may be connected with the loose handling of the painters, Rodin's painfully slow, intense realizations of the inward spirit of his subjects are foreign to the surface effects of most of the impressionists.

Rodin matured slowly, and his first principal work, the Age of Bronze, was not made until he was past 35, yet he achieved fame in his lifetime. After 1900 he knew intimately many of the great men of his time, and his apprentices included Antoine Bourdelle and Charles Despiau. In 1916 Rodin bequeathed his works to the state. He died in Meudon on Nov. 17, 1917.

Gates of Hell and Related Compositions

The Gates of Hell was conceived in the tradition of the great portals of Western art, such as Lorenzo Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise in Florence. Rodin was unable to plan the Gates as a total organized design, and they remained a loose federation of groups. Yet certain of the isolated figures or groups of figures, when enlarged and executed separately, became some of Rodin's finest pieces: Three Shades (1880), Crouching Woman (1885), the Old Courtesan (1885), the Kiss (1886), and the Thinker (1888).

The Thinker on the upper lintel of the Gates regards the debauchery and despair in the sections below. The Thinker was formally inspired by Michelangelo's terribilita', and the motif of the right elbow crossed over the left thigh derives from Michelangelo's Medici tombs. In this piece Rodin conceived of man as beset by intellectual frustrations and incapable of acting: the figure is self-enclosed, completely introverted.

The Three Shades on the top of the portal also derives from Michelangelo, especially from the figures of the Slaves, but instead of repeating the inner torment of Michelangelo's figures, they seem beset by languor and utter despair.

The Kiss was derived from one of the pairs of intertwined lovers on the Gates. The over-life-sized marble figures, sitting on a mass of roughhewn marble, seem to emerge out of the unfinished block in the manner of Michelangelo. But the surfaces of the bodies of the lovers are soft and fluid and suggest the warmth of living flesh. As seen in the Kiss, Rodin was capable of unabashed eroticism.

The Old Courtesan, based on a study of an aged Italian woman, may have been inspired by a poem of François Villon. Here Rodin showed through the sagging breasts, wrinkled skin, and phlegmatic gestures a completely different conception of the human female form, but the response of the observer is not one of revulsion. In this old, tottering body Rodin captured not ugliness but an uncommon sort of beauty.

Further Reading

Albert E. Elsen, Rodin (1963), is a well-documented study of Rodin as the great innovator in 19th-century sculpture, with particular emphasis on the Gates of Hell. Elsen's Auguste Rodin: Readings on His Life and Works (1965) contains writings about Rodin by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who was his secretary, and by Truman H. Bartlett and Henri Dujardin-Beaumetz. Other studies of Rodin include Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin (1945), and Denys Sutton, Triumphant Satyr: The World of Auguste Rodin (1967). Sommerville Story, Rodin and His Works (1951), and Robert Descharnes and Jean-François Chabrun, eds., Auguste Rodin (1967), are valuable for their illustrations. For background consult Louis W. Flaccus, Artists and Thinkers (1916), and Sheldon Cheney, Sculpture of the World: A History (1968). □

Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917). French sculptor and draughtsman, one of the greatest and most influential European artists of his period. He was the first sculptor since the heyday of Neoclassicism to occupy a central position in public attention and he opened up new possibilities for his art in a manner comparable to that of his great contemporaries in painting—Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. His beginnings, however, were not auspicious. He came from a poor background, was rejected three times by the École des Beaux-Arts, and for many years worked mainly as an ornamental mason. In the winter of 1875–6 he visited Italy, where (as he later wrote to Bourdelle) ‘Michelangelo freed me from academism.’ Michelangelo was the inspiration for his first major work, a male nude, The Age of Bronze, which was exhibited at the 1877 Salon. (Like many of Rodin's statues, this exists in several casts; the Rodin Museum in Paris has examples of virtually all his work. There is also a Rodin museum in Philadelphia.) It caused a sensation because the naturalistic treatment of the naked figure was so different from the idealizing conventions then current—he was even accused of having cast it from a live model. Three years later, in 1880, his reputation now established, Rodin was commissioned by the state to make a bronze door for a proposed Musée des Arts Décoratifs. He never finished the huge work—The Gates of Hell— in a definitive way (he worked on it intermittently until 1900 and the museum never came into being in its proposed form), but he poured some of his finest creative energy into it, and many of the nearly 200 figures that are part of it formed the basis of famous independent sculptures, most notably The Kiss and The Thinker. The several casts of the complete structure that exist were made after Rodin's death. Rodin's overall design is a kind of Romantic reworking of Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise for the Florence Baptistery, the twisted and anguished figures, irregularly arranged, reminiscent of Michelangelo's Last Judgement and Gustav Doré's illustrations for the Divine Comedy. The modelling is often rough and ‘unfinished’ and anatomical forms are exaggerated or simplified in the cause of intensity of expression.

These traits were taken further in some of Rodin's monuments, beginning with the famous group of The Burghers of Calais (1885–95), commissioned by the city of Calais for a site in front of the town hall (there are several other casts, including one in Victoria Tower Gardens, London). In the figures of the six hostages who face the threat of death, Rodin showed a variety of responses—including anguish as well as courage—to an extreme emotional crisis. The civic authorities had wanted something in a more traditional heroic-patriotic vein, and the monument was eventually unveiled only after years of wrangling. Even worse hostility was aroused a few years later by his statue of Balzac. This was commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1891, but Rodin's design was so radical—an expression of the elemental power of genius rather than a portrait of an individual—that it was rejected, and the monument was not finally cast and set up until 1939— at the intersection of the boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse in Paris. It ranks as the most original piece of public statuary created in the 19th century, and Brancusi wrote that it was ‘indisputably the starting point of modern sculpture’. Rodin himself described it as ‘the sum of my whole life’. In spite of the controversy his work caused, by 1900 Rodin was widely regarded as the greatest living sculptor, and in that year a pavilion was devoted to his work at the Paris World Fair. From this point he created no more major monuments, his sculpture consisting mainly of portrait busts, including many of eminent personalities. In his later years he was also a prolific draughtsman, mainly of the female nude, some of the drawings being highly erotic. (He was famed for his voracious sexual appetite, but this was excused as an aspect of his Olympian stature; his lovers included Gwen John.) He left his collection of his own work to the state to found the Musée Rodin in Paris, opened in 1919. His villa at Meudon (now a suburb of Paris) is an outstation of the museum. Rodin is buried in the garden at Meudon, with a cast of The Thinker overlooking his grave.

Although the literary and symbolic significance he attached to his work has been out of keeping with the conception of ‘pure’ sculpture that predominated in the 20th century, Rodin's influence on the development of modern art has been immense, for single-handedly he revived sculpture from a period of relative stagnation when it had lagged behind the momentous achievements of contemporary painters and made it once again a vehicle for intense personal expression. His sense of movement and energy and his use of the partial figure (particularly the torso) as a legitimate subject were among his most potent legacies.

Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917). French sculptor and graphic artist, one of the greatest and most influential European artists of his period. He was the first sculptor since the heyday of Neoclassicism to occupy a central position in public attention and he opened up new possibilities for his art in a manner comparable to that of his great contemporaries in painting—Cézanne, Gauguin, and van Gogh. He struggled early in his career (he was rejected by the École des Beaux-Arts three times) and his work was often the subject of controversy, but after a large exhibition devoted to him at the Paris World Fair in 1900 he was widely regarded as the greatest living sculptor. His most characteristic works were figures or groups of a historical, literary, allegorical, or symbolic nature. At the centre of his career was a commission he received from the French state in 1880 to make a set of bronze doors for a proposed Musée des Art Décoratifs. Rodin never definitively finished the huge work—The Gates of Hell (he worked on it intermittently until 1900 and the museum never came into being in the proposed form)—but he poured some of his finest creative energy into it, and many of the nearly 200 figures that are part of it were the basis of famous independent sculptures, most notably The Thinker and The Kiss (the marble version of The Kiss in the Tate Gallery, London, was carved by an assistant in 1901–4; see DIRECT CARVING). The several casts that exist of the complete structure of the Gates were made after Rodin's death. The overall design is a kind of Romantic reworking of Ghiberti's 15th-century Gates of Paradise at the Baptistery of Florence Cathedral, the twisted and anguished figures, irregularly arranged, recalling Michelangelo's Last Judgement and Gustav Doré's illustrations for Dante's Inferno (1861). The modelling is often rough and ‘unfinished’ (unlike the smooth finish of the marble Kiss) and anatomical forms are exaggerated or simplified in the cause of intensity of expression.

These traits were taken further in some of Rodin's monuments, most radically in his statue of Balzac. This was commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres in 1891, but Rodin's design was so unconventional—an expression of the elemental power of genius rather than a portrait of an individual—that it was rejected, and the monument was not finally cast and set up until 1939—at the intersection of the Boulevards Raspail and Montparnasse in Paris. It ranks as the most original piece of public statuary created in the 19th century, and Brancusi wrote that it was ‘indisputably the starting point of modern sculpture'. Rodin himself described it as ‘the sum of my whole life'. After 1900 he created no more major monuments, his sculpture consisting mainly of portrait busts, including many of eminent personalities. In this period he was also a prolific draughtsman, mainly of the female nude, some of the drawings being highly erotic. (He was famed for his sexual appetite, but this was excused as an aspect of his Olympian stature; his lovers included Gwen John.) He also made etchings and published two books; L'Art (1911), a series of his conversations (translated as On Art and Artists, 1957); and Les Cathédrales de France (1914), which shows his love of the art of the Middle Ages (translated as The Cathedrals of France, 1965). Rodin left his own collection of his works to the state to found the Musée Rodin in Paris, opened in 1919. It has casts of virtually all his sculptural work. His villa at Meudon (now a suburb of Paris) is an annexe to the Musée Rodin; the sculptor is buried in the garden, with a cast of The Thinker overlooking his grave. There is also a Rodin Museum in Philadelphia.

Although the literary and symbolic significance attached to Rodin's work has been out of keeping with the conception of ‘pure’ sculpture that has predominated in the 20th century, his influence on modern art has been immense. Single-handedly he revived sculpture from a period of relative stagnation when it had lagged behind the momentous achievements of contemporary painters and made it once again a vehicle for intense personal expression. His sense of movement and energy and his use of the partial figure (particularly the torso) as a legitimate subject were among his most potent legacies, inspiring Bourdelle (his long-time assistant), for example. Just as important as his direct influence was the fervent reaction against his dominance among the avant-garde. As George Heard Hamilton writes, ‘Perhaps the proof of his greatness is to be seen in the work of such men as Maillol, Brancusi, Lipchitz, and others, who had to reject his method and his programme in order to assert their independence. Through the loyal opposition, so to speak, Rodin's inexhaustible energies reach to the present.’

Auguste Rodin

Born: November 12, 1840
Paris, France
Died: November 17, 1917
Meudon, France
French sculptor

The French sculptor Auguste Rodin created his sculptures largely as volumes existing in space, as materials to be controlled for a variety of surface effects. By doing this he anticipated the aims of many twentieth-century sculptors.

Childhood

François Auguste Rodin, the son of a police inspector, was born in Paris, France, on November 12, 1840. A shy child, Rodin showed little interest in anything besides drawing, and by the time he turned thirteen he had decided to dedicate his life to becoming an artist.

Rodin studied drawing under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran and modeling under the sculptor Jean Baptiste Carpeaux at the School of Decorative Arts in Paris (1854–1857). At the same time Rodin studied literature and history at the College de France. Rejected three times by a well-known art school, he supported himself by doing decorative work for ornamentalists and set designers.

In 1864 Rodin began to live with the young seamstress Rose Beuret, whom he married the last year of his life. Also in 1864 he completed his Man with a Broken Nose, a bust of an old street porter, which the Salon (French art gallery) rejected. That year he entered the studio of Carrier-Belleuse, a sculptor who worked in the light rococo, or elaborate, mode of the previous century. Rodin remained with Carrier-Belleuse for six years and always spoke warmly of him. In 1870 he and his teacher went to Brussels, Belgium, where they began the sculptural decoration of the Bourse.

The human figure

In 1875 Rodin went to Italy, where he was deeply inspired by the work of Donatello (c. 1386–1466) and of Michelangelo (1475–1564), whose sculpture he characterized as being marked by both "violence and constraint." Back in Paris in 1876, Rodin made a bronze statue of a standing man raising his arms toward his head in such a way as to project an air of uncertainty. Rodin originally entitled the piece the Vanquished, then called it the Age of Bronze. When he submitted it to the Salon, it caused an immediate controversy, for it was so lifelike that it was believed to have been cast from the living model. The piece was unusual for the time in that it had no literary or historical meaning.

In 1878 Rodin began work on the St. John the Baptist Preaching and various related works, including the Walking Man. Influenced partially by some of Donatello's late works, it was based on numerous poses of the model in constant motion. Rodin raised the very act of walking into a subject worthy of concentrated study.

By 1880 Rodin's fame had become international, and that year the French government hired him to design a doorway for the proposed Museum of Decorative Arts. The project, called the Gates of Hell after Dante's (1265–1321) Inferno, occupied Rodin for the rest of his life, and particularly in the next decade, but it was never finished. The gates were cast in their incomplete state in the late 1920s.

The Gates of Hell was conceived in the tradition of the great portals (gateways) of Western art, such as Lorenzo Ghiberti's (1378–1455) Gates of Paradise in Florence, Italy. Rodin was unable to plan the gates as a complete organized design and they remained a loose collection of groups. Yet certain of the isolated figures or groups of figures, when enlarged and executed separately, became some of Rodin's finest pieces: Three Shades (1880), Crouching Woman (1885), the Old Courtesan (1885), the Kiss (1886), and the Thinker (1888).

Portrait busts

From the late 1880s Rodin received many commissions from private individuals for portrait busts and from the state for monuments recognizing well-known people. Among Rodin's portrait busts are those of playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), writer Henri Rochefort (1830–1913), and poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867).

In the Head of Baudelaire (1892), as in his other portraits, Rodin went beyond mere realism to catch the inner spirit. Baudelaire's face looks ahead with strict attention, and the eyes seem to be transfixed (concentrated) upon something invisible.

Rodin matured slowly, and his first principal work, the Age of Bronze, was not made until he was past thirty-five, yet he achieved fame in his lifetime. After 1900 he knew intimately many of the great men of his time, and his apprentices included Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929) and Charles Despiau (1874–1946). In 1916 Rodin left his works to the state. He died in Meudon, France, on November 17, 1917.

For More Information

Butler, Ruth. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.

Grunfeld, Frederic R. Rodin: A Biography. New York: Holt, 1987.

Sutton, Denys. Triumphant Satyr: The World of Auguste Rodin. New York: Hawthorn Books, 1967.

Auguste Rodin , 1840-1917, French sculptor, b. Paris. He began his art study at 14 in the Petite École and in the school of Antoine Barye , earning his living by working for an ornament maker. In 1863 he went to work for the architectural sculptor A. E. Carrier-Belleuse, who had a great influence on him. From 1870 to 1875 he continued in the same trade in Brussels and then briefly visited Italy. In the Salon of 1877 he exhibited a nude male figure, The Age of Bronze (1876; Paris). It was both extravagantly praised and condemned; his critics unjustly accused him of having made a cast from life. From the furor Rodin gained the active support and patronage of Turquet, undersecretary of fine arts. His Age of Bronze and St. John (1878) were purchased for the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris.

The government gave him a studio in Paris, where he worked the rest of his life with growing fame. From 1880 on Rodin worked intermittently on studies for a huge bronze door for the Musée des Arts décoratifs. It was inspired by Dante's Inferno and was to be called the Gate of Hell. He never finished it. Among the 186 figures intended for it are Adam and Eve (1881; Metropolitan Mus.), The Thinker (1879-1900), and La Belle Heaulmière (both: Paris). These, together with his group The Burghers of Calais (Calais), completed in 1894, are among his most famous creations.

Other ambitious works are his monuments to Balzac (1897; Paris) and to Victor Hugo (1909; Paris). Rodin is also known for his drawings, his many fine portrait busts, and his figures and groups in marble, such as Ugolino (1882), Danaïd (1885), The Kiss (1886), and The Hand of God (1897-98) in the Rodin Museum, Paris, and Pygmalion and Galatea and The Bather in the Metropolitan Museum, N.Y.C. He is best represented in the Rodin museums of Paris and Philadelphia, but fine examples of his work are included in many public collections throughout the world.

Rodin's work is generally considered the most important contribution to sculpture of his century, although some recent critical opinion has found his allegorical works pretentious. Realistic in many respects, it is nevertheless imbued with a profound, romantic poetry. The Gothic, the dance, and the works of Dante, Baudelaire, and Michelangelo were major sources of inspiration. Rodin considered his work completed when it expressed his idea, and as a result his sculpture is varied in technique; some is polished, some is gouged and scraped, and some seems scarcely to have emerged from the rough stone. He worked long over his more important works, returning to them again and again but without injuring their essential vitality.

Bibliography: See biographies by F. Grunfeld (1987) and R. Butler (1993); studies by R. M. Rilke (1902 and 1907, rev. tr. 2004), S. Story (rev. ed. 1966), A. E. Elsen (1963, repr. 1967), R. Descharnes and J. F. Chabrun (tr. 1967), I. Jainu (1967), Y. Taillandier (1967), C. Lampert (1987), K. Varnedoe (2001), and A. E. Eisen (2003).

Rodin, Auguste (1840–1917) French sculptor, one of the greatest European artists of his time. Rodin's first major work, The Age of Bronze (1878), caused a scandal because the naked figure was so naturalistic. His next great project was The Gates of Hell, unfinished studies for a bronze door for the Musée des arts décoratifs. It provided him with the subjects for further great sculptures, including The Thinker (1880), The Kiss (1886), and Fugit Amor (1897). Perhaps his most extraordinary work is the full-length bronze of Balzac, completed in 1897.

http://www.musee-rodin.fr