Auguste Rodin

French sculptor

• Born: November 12, 1840
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: November 17, 1917
• Place of death: Meudon, France

One of the greatest sculptors of all time, Rodin has been hailed for both the monumentality and the psychological penetration of his sculpture. Much of his work has a kinetic quality, a dynamism that takes over the solid material of his sculpture, transforming it into the expression of a towering personality.

Early Life

The youngest of two children in a French working-class home, Auguste Rodin (roh-dahn) was educated with great care under the supervision of his uncle in a friar’s school until he was fourteen. By the age of ten, he had already shown an interest in drawing, and it was thought that he would become an artisan. His teachers were impressed with his dedication and talent and encouraged him to believe that he would one day become a fine artist. However, his early years were not full of success. Indeed, he failed three times to gain acceptance at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he had hoped to study sculpture.

Working as a craftsperson, Rodin studied on his own the work of Antoine-Louis Bayre (1795-1875), who was famous for his lifelike depictions of animals. He also assisted Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824-1887) in his studio, beginning in 1864, and closely followed developments in the world of contemporary sculpture. His early sculptures, one of his father (c. 1860) and one of Father Pierre-Julien Eymard (1863), already exhibit his dexterous and precise sense for the human face. Father Eymard, the superior of the Societas Sanctissimi Sacramenti, profoundly impressed and touched Rodin, who had stayed briefly in a cloister before deciding that the religious life did not suit him.

Still largely unacknowledged, Rodin traveled to Italy in 1875 to study the sculpture of Donatello and Michelangelo. Not being able to afford a long trip, he soon returned to France with great enthusiasm for the Italian masters, which resulted in his sculpture, The Age of Bronze , a work that was so lifelike he was accused of having taken a mold of a live model. Other artists came to his defense in what was to be the first of many controversies concerning Rodin’s techniques and choices of subject matter.

By the late 1870’s, the state was acquiring sculptures such as Saint John the Baptist Preaching , which were every bit as realistic as The Age of Bronze, for by now the temper of the age was beginning to swing Rodin’s way, valuing precisely his uncanny ability to render the human figure in bronze as if it were alive. Rather than accepting traditional sculpture with stereotypical gestures, Rodin had accustomed his contemporaries to a startling, almost photographic depiction of the individual, of a peasant-faced Saint John, for example, crooking one finger of his extended right arm while dropping his left arm, slightly flexed, to his side. This portrait of man in action, in mid-stride, with a body that reflected an inner psychological life and purposiveness, was a stunning achievement.

Life’s Work

Now a figure of considerable influence, Rodin was courted and given many commissions, including one that involved the decoration of a door for the future Museum of Decorative Arts. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno, Rodin chose to create The Gates of Hell , a work of enormous ambition that he never finished and perhaps never could, for as William Hale notes, the sculptor took as his subject the creation of chaos itself. Kept in his studio until his death, the work reflects the artist’s constant experimentations with style and his engagement with all the inchoate human desires that are never quite fulfilled.

Seated atop this magnificent work is the world-famous statue The Thinker . He is at once a perfectly realized and enigmatic figure. With his chin resting on his bent right hand, and his upper body leaning forward in somber meditation, he is evocative of a powerful human intellect but also of a brooding, perhaps dissatisfied nature for whom thought itself does not suffice. Various commentators have noted that this powerfully muscled figure is out of proportion—a deliberate ploy to increase the tension of the pose, to use physical power to suggest mental strength. Behind the thinker, in the tympanum, are the vacant-faced figures of the damned, engaged in their ghastly dance of death while other falling figures suggest horror and the frustration of failed lives. On the twenty-one-foot-tall door (thirteen feet wide and three feet deep), the artist uses the size of human figures (ranging from six inches to four feet) to portray the differentiated scale of a world of human sufferers.

Rodin repeatedly flouted his society’s notion of what was dignified and presentable. His commissioned sculpture of Victor Hugo was rejected because he produced a seated rather than a standing figure. Even more bitterness was occasioned by his monument to Honoré de Balzac, which many of his contemporaries considered to be grotesque, a violent and swollen piece that was called “an obscenity,” “a toad in a sack,” “this lump of plaster kicked together by a lunatic,” and the like. Rodin was aiming, however, not for a faithful likeness of his subject but for a visceral rendering of his extraordinary imagination and body of work.

Rodin pursued his sculpting subjects as if he were a biographer, and in the case of Balzac went so far as to visit the places where the novelist’s fiction was set. Balzac had died at the age of fifty-one, his body exhausted from having produced his novels so intensely and rapidly. Rodin contacted Balzac’s tailor to get a measure of his clothes, he checked accounts of the writer’s physical appearance, and he exercised his conception of the writer by sculpting more than twenty studies of his head and body. Many of these preliminary efforts were realistic portraits, as though Rodin preferred to work with the outward facts and burrow more deeply into his subject’s interior life. The result was a huge figure with a bull neck, a distorted face, and an immense torso—the point being that here was an artist whose very physical presence was magnificently marked by the lives he had imagined. The statue was like a thing of nature, with the figure’s features erupting from the surface like volcanic life itself.

Rodin’s work in marble—The Kiss (1886), for example—has been more accessible and a great favorite with the public. A highly erotic man and artist, Rodin has accentuated the effect of the embrace by the angle he has chosen, which has the woman’s right leg thrusting forward while the man’s fingers touch her thigh. There is an equality in the embrace, a mutuality (emphasized by the touching of their feet and the entwinement of their legs) that seems perfect.

By 1900, Rodin was recognized as the foremost sculptor of his period. Soon he would travel to do a bust of George Bernard Shaw (1906) and sculptures of English and American notables. In 1905, forty-two of his works were exhibited in the Luxembourg Museum. He continued to innovate, creating human figures that emphasize his interest in the motion and position of bodies. By fragmenting these sculptures, taking away certain physical features, expressions, and bodily parts, he accentuated his art. His Walking Man is headless, because nothing must distract from his study of the shift in weight, the rhythm of musculature, and the placement of the feet—all of which contribute to an appreciation of how a man walks. Rodin believed in the principle of leaving out something, of an understatement that allows other features or themes to be seen more clearly.

Significance

Auguste Rodin was both a great scholar and a creator of art. No artist of his stature has exceeded his ability to learn from his predecessors. He was also very much a man of the nineteenth century, taking a profound interest in individual lives, treating his preparations for portrait sculpture the way a modern psychological biographer does his or her research and writing, amassing evidence but also probing for the heart of the subject. He welcomed new tools—the camera, for example—not only to record his work, to help him in modeling and studying his subjects, but also to assist him in capturing reality from new points of view.

There are many accounts of Rodin working in his studio. The biography by Frederic V. Grunfeld contains many passages that show how carefully Rodin studied the nude human body—not simply to attain accuracy of presentation but also to use physical details, the tone and the play of different muscle groups, to suggest mental and spiritual life. Rodin knew that he had to imbue outward forms with a sense of inner life. His statues are not static. They have the dynamism of Renaissance forms, of the works by Donatello that Rodin admired so profusely, but Rodin’s work has something more: the pulsing of muscles that reflect interior energies. It is as if the sculptor makes what is invisible visible.

Notoriously slow in executing his commissions, Rodin was known to keep works many years past their deadlines, half-finished, awaiting his inspiration and his maturing conception of what the work could yield to him. In some cases, as in his work on Victor Hugo, he never did find the right form, the appropriate means of expression for his subject. In others, as with his work on Balzac, he was determined to shape a figure that revealed all he had to say about this titanic figure of literature.

Perhaps more than any other sculptor, Rodin concerned himself with sculpture and its relationship to nature. His pieces are renowned for the way they take the light, for the artist’s realization that the meaning of form depends upon how it reacts with its environment. A work that has no context, or does not create a context for itself, is a work that is only half-realized. Few great artists have matched Rodin’s exquisite sense of the wholeness of art, of the perfect work that creates its own standards, its own way of measuring itself and the world around it.

Bibliography

Butler, Ruth. Rodin: The Shape of Genius. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Insightful, comprehensive biography, using previously unpublished letters as source material. Particularly good at describing Rodin’s relationships with women and the politics of the artistic community.

Champigneulle, Bernard. Rodin. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1967. A sound biographical and critical study, with superb black-and-white and color plates, notes, and a list of illustrations. No bibliography and only an inadequate index.

Elsen, Albert E. In Rodin’s Studio: A Photographic Record of Sculpture in the Making. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980. A fascinating study of the way Rodin used and was influenced by photography in the creation of his work. Photographs of Rodin and his studio, as well as of his work in various stages of composition, make this an extraordinarily valuable study.

Grunfeld, Frederic V. Rodin: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1987. The first full-scale biography of Rodin to appear since 1936. Grunfeld has found and taken advantage of many new sources. His huge book is well written, copiously illustrated, and enhanced by a full bibliography, extensive notes, and a comprehensive index. Written for both scholars and a larger, general audience, this biography is essential reading.

Hale, William Harlan. The World of Rodin, 1840-1917. New York: Time-Life Books, 1969. A copiously illustrated, life-and-times approach to the artist’s life that includes a chronology of artists, a bibliography, a comprehensive index, and “A Guide to the Gates of Hell,” detailing the architectural features and figures of this complex masterpiece.

Rodin, Auguste. Rodin Sculptures. Selected by Ludwig Goldscheider. London: Phaidon Press, 1970. Large, handsome black-and-white reproductions of Rodin’s most important works. This work is enhanced by detailed notes on plates and succinct introductions to the artist’s life and work.

Vilain, Jacques, et al. Rodin at the Musée Rodin. Translated from French by Judith Hayward. London: Scala Books, 1997. Catalog of Rodin’s works held by the museum. Museum curators have compiled a chronological study of Rodin’s career, a biographical sketch of the artist, and photographs and written descriptions of Rodin’s major works.