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.’
