Auguste Rodin

RODIN, Auguste, for René François Auguste

French, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 12 November 1840 , in Paris; died 17 November 1917 , in Meudon (Hauts-de-Seine).

Sculptor, watercolourist, painter (wash), draughtsman. Figures, nudes. Busts, statues, groups, monuments.

Symbolism.

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Auguste Rodin was born on the Rue de l’Arbalète, in the 5th Arrondissement of Paris. His father came from Normandy and his mother from Lorraine. His father was a salaried clerk in the police force. As a child, Rodin loved drawing, and as soon as he was 14 years old and had completed his early education at a boarding school in Beauvais run by an uncle, his parents, far from thwarting his aspirations, enrolled him at the École Impériale de Dessin. This school was located on the Rue de l’École de Médecine and was known as the ‘Petite École’ - as opposed to the ‘Grande École’ (the École des Beaux-Arts). The Petite École was run by Lecocq de Boisbaudran. Here, Rodin met some of the artists who would go on to define this period, including James McNeill Whistler, Henri Fantin-Latour, and Alphonse Legros, and was lucky enough to have a few lessons with Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, who taught modelling there. The teaching at the Petite École was thoroughly steeped in the artistic methods of the 18th century, and this had a powerful influence on Rodin - not only on his spirit, which remained emotionally attached to this period, but also on his technique, in which both the art of relief and a love of soft forms would predominate. He took to art with an extraordinary determination, painting, modelling, and, above all, drawing - not only at the École but also in the Louvre, the Bibliothèque, the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle (where he was given some guidance by Antoine-Louis Barye), the horse market, the gardens, and the streets, nurturing a passion for nature and reality. However, although he applied three consecutive times to the École des Beaux-Arts when he was about 18, he was not admitted. His conception of art was already at odds with the aesthetics and methods then current in academic tradition.

Rodin realized that he would never succeed via this route. Furthermore, since his parents were not well off, he had to go out and earn a living straightaway. He found employment with an ornamental artist, but throughout the time he was producing vast quantities of decorative motifs, he never lost sight of his objective of succeeding as a sculptor. The great skill that he acquired there earned him entry into the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, where countless models for bronzes, busts, and fantasy figures were made and still reproduced many years later. He also rough-hewed marble for various sculptors and developed ideas for all kinds of jewellery, deepening his knowledge of every aspect of sculpture. In 1862, he was grief stricken by the death of his sister and took refuge with the monks at Très-St-Sacrement, who convinced him to return to his vocation. In 1863, while he was living there, he sculpted a Bust of the Father Superior St Pierre-Julien Aymard. In 1864, he met Rose Beuret, who would become his lifetime companion.

He returned to Carrier-Belleuse from 1864 to 1870 and resumed his ornamental work; one of his commissions was for the Hôtel de la Païva on the Champs-Élysées. In 1864, he had presented the Salon with the mask of the Man with the Broken Nose, whose prototypes from Antiquity he had studied, but it was refused. After the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, he was persuaded to move to Belgium by a friend, the Belgian sculptor Antoine van Rasbourg, who had been awarded a commission for various works for public buildings there. Rodin stayed in Belgium for five years and, with his friend, built a monument in Antwerp in memory of a burgomaster, some caryatids for the Palais de la Bourse, and some friezes for the Palais des Académies in Brussels. In spite of this work, his financial situation remained precarious, and when he returned to Paris, he could not afford to cast the works he was modelling; most were destroyed, including a Bacchante and a statue in Gothic tradition. Nevertheless, the 1870 work Bust of Mignon, which was modelled on Beuret, survived, and its grace shows the influence of Carpeaux.

In 1876, he made his first trip to Italy. He came back profoundly influenced by Donatello and especially Michelangelo. The following year he went on his first tour of France, visiting cathedrals and major Gothic monuments, the latter of which he would continue to study for the rest of his life. One of his earliest surviving works is Man Waking up to Nature, the plaster version of which was exhibited at the Salon of 1877 under the title of L’Âge d’airain (The Age of Bronze). So perfect was its anatomical precision that Rodin was immediately accused of having made a cast from life. The incident was discussed in the press at length. Rodin attempted to defend himself, and the Directorate of Fine Arts had to intervene, ordering the administration’s inspectors to conduct an inquiry. A group of artists, including Paul Dubois, Henri Chapu, Carrier-Belleuse, Eugène Delaplanche, and Alexandre Falguière, wrote an official letter to the minister to confirm the authenticity of Rodin’s work from nature and guarantee his future as a great sculptor. During this time, he was involved in the preparatory work for the 1878 Exposition Universelle, notably the works in the Palais du Trocadéro. He also took part in the competition for the Commemorative Monument to the Défense Nationale with a maquette entitled Defence or Call to Arms, which did not even make the initial shortlist of 50 works chosen by the jury. At the Salon of 1880, he presented the bronze version of The Age of Bronze and a plaster model of a St John the Baptist Preaching, with both relief work and chiselling, which received only a third class medal but would later be purchased by the French state.

Around 1880, when he was nearly 40 years old, in order to support himself and his family, he entered the Sèvres Porcelain Manufactory, where he produced numerous decorations for ceramic vases. Although he had still received little success as a sculptor, the Directorate of Fine Art gave him first one, then two studios in the Dépôt des Marbres, where he was able to work comfortably. In 1880, the Directorate commissioned a major work from him: a door for the planned museum of decorative arts (which was never built) and would become known as The Gates of Hell. Once he more or less had the material means that his creativity required, and was permanently installed in his studios, Rodin began to build up an enormous body of work. In 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris, he held a solo exhibition in a pavilion on the Place de l’Alma. This finally earned him the recognition of an immense international public and, thereafter, fame and fortune.

In the two studios that had been assigned to him in the Dépôt des Marbres, one at 182 Rue de l’Université, Rodin worked for years on The Gates of Hell. He had decided upon the substantial dimensions of about 21 x 13 feet (635 x 400 cm); he had also decided to base the subject matter on Dante’s Divine Comedy, with a large number of small figures so that he could never again be accused of making a cast from life. Two tall relief panels represent the key episodes in the Divine Comedy and contain more than 180 figures. A third relief forms a lintel at the top of the doors, at the center of which is the figure of Dante; he is seated, unhappily contemplating humanity writhing in the torments of punishment at his feet. This is considered to be a version of the Dante who, isolated, taken out of context, enlarged, and placed in front of the Panthéon, is better known as The Thinker. Surrounding the reliefs is an elaborate frame, surmounted by three Shades. The Gates of Hell is the largest of Rodin’s monumental works and the largest sculpture of the Symbolist period. For this work, Rodin employed all the techniques of the trade - low relief, high relief, and sculpture in the round - which give the work a diversity that does not compromise its homogeneity. During the long conceptual phase, and diverted by other aspirations, Rodin perhaps regretted the decorative bias of the piece and abandoned it. The work was never finished, although he returned to it throughout his life, reworking some of the figures, changing them around, and removing others to exhibit at the Salon. However, it was shown at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, then, after Rodin’s death, cast in bronze and permanently installed at the Musée Rodin.

Meanwhile, from 1879 to 1883, he sculpted a large Bust of Bellona and exhibited two life-sized figures at the Salon: The Creation of Man and Adam (perhaps in memory of the Sistine Chapel), which have since been destroyed, along with Eve, the bronze version of which was shown at the Salon in 1889. He followed these up with busts of W. E. Henley, Jean-Paul Laurens, Carrier-Belleuse, and the engraver Alphonse Legros. A few milestones of the rest of his vast body of work include: bronze Bust of Victor Hugo (1884); The Man with the Snake (1885); Bust of Henri Becque (1886), which was later erected at the end of the Avenue de Villiers; the model for The Kiss (1886), the enlarged marble version of which was purchased by the French state; the first sketch for the Monument to Victor Hugo (1886); Head of St John after the Decapitation (1887), inspired by the Italian Renaissance; the model for the Monument to Claudio Vicunha, President of the Republic of Chile (1888), whose energetic figure dominates a pedestal representing a Victorious Apollo, a monument that now stands in a square in Buenos Aires; the Bust of Mrs Morlo Vicunha (1888), one of his most moving female portraits; the bronze Bust of Dalou (1889); and the Statue of Bastien-Lepage (1889).

In 1889, Rodin also produced the first life-sized plaster group of the Burghers of Calais, a monument commissioned in 1885 by the town of Calais that was supposed to have been ready to be delivered to the town in 1886. Made of bronze, it was eventually erected in Calais in 1895. It commemorates the sacrifice of several citizens who volunteered to be taken prisoner by English forces in order to spare the city from siege in 1347. At first the patrons objected to Rodin’s treatment of the subject but eventually accepted the monument. However, Rodin objected to the high base on which it was placed and its location. Subsequently, replicas have been placed at ground level as Rodin wished, by the Thames in London, on a promenade in Copenhagen, and elsewhere. Pedestrians walking past the statue are often taken by surprise and turn back to look at this group of men in shirtsleeves, subtly linked by their hands, feet, and shirts. The figures seem to be walking among the crowd, and the overall lines of their bodies and the general rhythms of the group - at least as much as the expressions on their faces - communicate tragic emotion. Rodin shows them walking to their execution, each of them in turn expressing serenity, fear, courage, and faith. As with many of his other sculptures, Rodin made them as nude figures and then covered them with shirts, which reveal their shapes, attitudes, and movements. In these various respects, the Burghers of Calais prefigure the fundamental innovations in Rodin’s work that would result in his Balzac of 1898 - the movement of the bodies, the eternal dynamism, and the insertion of the work into the surrounding space and the space into the work.

From 1889 to 1896, thanks to commissions and public interest, Rodin’s output grew to staggering proportions. Works from this period include: the Portrait of Lady R., in silver; The Thought, a marble sculpture depicting Camille Claudel; The Old Courtesan, in bronze; The Earth, a large study of a female torso; Pain; the Bust of Rochefort and the Bust of Puvis de Chavannes; the Monument to Claude Lorrain, erected in Nancy (not without new difficulties with the commissioning authority); Venus and Adonis Dying; Triumphant Young Girl; Orpheus and Euridyce; Cupid and Psyche; The Illusion; and Daughter of Icarus. In 1892, when his Monument to Sarmiento, President of the Republic of Argentina was unveiled, it caused a riot.

In 1896, a work commissioned for the Panthéon came out of his studio: the plaster group entitled Monument to Victor Hugo. Rodin had audaciously portrayed him nude, causing a scandal in official circles and beyond. Gustave Larroumet, the undersecretary of the Directorate of Fine Arts, found himself obliged to make the decision to send it to the Luxembourg Gardens; in 1909, it was eventually placed in the garden of the Palais Royal on an extraordinary base composed of pieces of marble designed by Rodin, which was completely destroyed when it was moved again in 1939. The scandal did not stop the Directorate’s undersecretary from commissioning a second clothed monument for the Panthéon.

In 1898, Rodin caused another scandal with the Balzac commissioned by the Société des Gens de Lettres, which was to be placed in a Paris square. He exhibited it at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, but it caused such a storm of controversy that Rodin withdrew the work from the Salon. The finished Balzac was preceded by more than 25 studies for the head and about 20 for the body. Besides the scandal of a bourgeoisie offended by anything new, more enlightened critics caused controversy by associating Rodin with Medardo Rosso. Rodin admired Rosso enormously and had previously exchanged a bronze Torso for Rosso’s Woman Laughing (1891). Unfortunately, the two artists fell out over a quarrel about Balzac, probably stoked by others, regarding which of them had first introduced the Impressionist vision into sculpture. Born in 1840, Rodin was the exact contemporary of the Impressionists. Although his work cannot be described as Impressionist, he too was sensitive to the fragility of appearances, and numerous examples in his statues, wash drawings, and other drawings show his keenness to express movement and to prolong the form over the passage of time, which he himself clearly analysed with reference to the Monument in Memory of Maréchal Ney by François Rude.

The triumph of his exhibition in the Place de l’Alma in 1900, which erased any traces of the controversy surrounding Balzac, did not deter him from continuing to work. He had never stopped drawing but, in this final period, he drew even more than he sculpted, ultimately producing a total of several thousand drawings and watercolours. He had studied drypoint and etching techniques with Legros in London but took on little illustration work: between 1885 and 1895, he provided some of the illustrations for The Complete Works of Victor Hugo; in 1899, he produced the frontispiece for Le Jardin des Supplices (The Torture Garden) by Octave Mirbeau; in 1902, he created some of the illustrations for Five Poems (Cinq Poèmes) by Ambroise Victor Hugo; in 1902, he made the original lithographs, published by Vollard, for Octave Mirbeau’s The Torture Garden; in 1910, his wash drawings were reproduced as phototypes for Poèmes d’Humilis (Poems of Humilis) by Germain Nouveau; in 1918, after his death, his pen drawings for Twenty-seven Poems from Les Fleurs du Mal by Charles Baudelaire were reproduced as phototypes; in 1935, his drawings were engraved on wood by J.-L. Perrichon for Ovid’s Elegies; in 1955, Paul Baudier engraved his drawings on wood for Dante’s Inferno; and La Tentation de Saint Antoine (The Temptation of St Antony) by Gustave Flaubert, has also been cited, but with no reference, date, or publisher.

Rodin was also still producing sculptures, including: The Kiss, a large marble group; a sketch for the Monument to Work; Benediction, a delicate group; the large bronze figure of Eve; a portrait of the sculptor Alexandre Falguière; The Earth and the Moon; and Psyche Carrying Her Lamp. In 1902, he produced 13 works, including The Temptation of St Antony, The Hand of God, and The Sculptor and His Muse. In 1904, he produced Romeo and Juliet, Portrait of Mrs S. (an extremely elegant marble sculpture), and a Portrait of George Wyndham, an English statesman. In 1905, there were 11 works, including Bust of Gustave Geffroy, Bust of Miss E.F., and also an ensemble with an overtly decorative intention, making it exceptional in Rodin’s work - the series of high reliefs entitled The Seasons, commissioned to decorate a villa in Évian. Inspired by the serenity of Greek statuary, the series consists of three pediments that form overdoors, representing young women stretched out asleep beneath bunches of flowers or tumbling masses of fruit, and two white stone bowls, representing children playing and jostling among the corn and ripe vine branches. In these high reliefs, which are comparable to groups, Rodin was particularly successful in his division of light across the whole work and the reciprocal integration of the forms, whose contours progressively melt into their own shadows and the shadows cast by the other figures. Other groups and busts were to follow, including the Bust of Marcelin Berthelot, the Bust of Georges Clémenceau in (approximately 1911), and the Bust of E. Clementel.

During the time of sculptors like Carrier-Belleuse, Denys Puech, and Falguière, Rodin confided: ‘I do not think it necessary to linger over polishing the toes and locks of hair; these are details of no interest to me. They would compromise the general idea and overall direction of my work.’ For the rest of his career, beyond the external appearance of the theme, it was the fleeting emotion experienced in a moment that the artist wished to preserve and re-create by translating it into three-dimensional equivalents. In some respects Rodin’s work is a final echo of Romanticism, but above all it heralds modern sculpture in that it favours expression over realism and sculptural sense over narrative imitation.

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