Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin

French sculptor

Also known as

• François-Auguste-René Rodin

born

November 12, 1840

Paris, France

died

November 17, 1917 (aged 77)

Meudon, France

notable works

• “The Thinker”

View Biographies Related To Categories

• sculpture

Dates

• November 12
• November 17

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Auguste Rodin, in full François-Auguste-René Rodin (born Nov. 12, 1840, Paris, France—died Nov. 17, 1917, Meudon), French sculptor of sumptuous bronze and marble figures, considered by some critics to be the greatest portraitist in the history of sculpture. His The Gates of Hell, commissioned in 1880 for the future Museum of the Decorative Arts in Paris, remained unfinished at his death but nonetheless resulted in two of Rodin’s most famous images: The Thinker (1880) and The Kiss (1886). His portraits include monumental figures of Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac.

Early life and work

Rodin was born into a poor family. At age 13 he entered a drawing school, where he learned drawing and modeling, and at 17 he attempted to enter the École des Beaux-Arts, but he failed the competitive examinations three times. The following year (1858), he decided to earn his living by doing decorative stonework. Traumatized by the death of his sister Marie in 1862, he considered entering the church; but in 1864 the young sculptor met Rose Beuret, a seamstress, who became his life companion, although he did not marry her until a few weeks before her death in February 1917.

Rodin had begun to work with the sculptor Albert Carrier-Belleuse when, in 1864, his first submission to the official Salon exhibition, The Man with the Broken Nose, was rejected. His early independent work included also several portrait studies of Beuret. In 1871 he went with Carrier-Belleuse to work on decorations for public monuments in Brussels. Dismissed by Carrier-Belleuse, he collaborated on the execution of decorative bronzes, and Beuret joined him in Brussels.

In 1875, at age 35, Rodin had yet to develop a personally expressive style because of the pressures of the decorative work. Italy gave him the shock that stimulated his genius. He visited Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice before returning to Brussels. The inspiration of Michelangelo and Donatello rescued him from the academicism of his working experience. Under those influences, he molded the bronze The Vanquished, his first original work, the painful expression of a vanquished energy aspiring to rebirth. It provoked scandals in the artistic circles of Brussels and again at the Paris Salon, where it was exhibited in 1877 as The Age of Bronze. The realism of the work contrasted so greatly with the statues of Rodin’s contemporaries that he was accused of having formed its mold upon a living person.

In 1877 Rodin returned to Paris, and in 1879 his former master Carrier-Belleuse, now director of the Sèvres porcelain factory, asked him for designs. He was rejected in various competitions for monuments to be erected in London and Paris, but finally he received a commission to execute a statue for City Hall in Paris. Meanwhile, he explored his personal style in St. John the Baptist Preaching (1878). Its success and that of The Age of Bronze at the salons of Paris and Brussels in 1880 established his reputation as a sculptor at age 40.

Toward the achievement of his art

At an age when most artists already had completed a large body of work, Rodin was just beginning to affirm his personal art. He received a state commission to create a bronze door for the future Museum of Decorative Arts, a grant that provided him with two workshops and whose advance payments made him financially secure.

That bronze door was to be the great effort of Rodin’s life. Although it was commissioned for delivery in 1884, it was left unfinished at his death in 1917. The theme of its scenes was borrowed from Dante’s Divine Comedy, and eventually it came to be called The Gates of Hell. His original conception was similar to that of the 15th-century Italian sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti in his The Gates of Paradise doors for the Baptistery in Florence. His plans were profoundly altered, however, by his visit to London in 1881 at the invitation of the painter Alphonse Legros. There Rodin saw the many Pre-Raphaelite paintings and drawings inspired by Dante, above all the hallucinatory works of William Blake. He transformed his plans for The Gates to ones that would reveal a universe of convulsed forms tormented by love, pain, and death. This unachieved monument was the framework out of which he created independent sculptural figures and groups, among them his famous The Thinker, originally conceived as a seated portait of Dante for the upper part of the door.

In 1884 Rodin was commissioned to create a monument for the town of Calais to commemorate the sacrifice of the burghers who gave themselves as hostages to King Edward III of England in 1347 to raise the yearlong siege of the famine-ravaged city. Rodin completed work on The Burghers of Calais within two years, but the monument was not dedicated until 1895. In 1913 a bronze casting of the Calais group was installed in the gardens of Parliament in London to commemorate the intervention of the English queen who had compelled her husband, King Edward, to show clemency to the heroes.

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While the artist’s glory continued to increase, his private life was troubled by the numerous liaisons into which his unbridled sensuality plunged him. About 1885 he became the lover of one of his students, Camille Claudel, the gifted sister of the poet Paul Claudel. It proved a stormy romance beset by numerous quarrels, but it persisted until Camille’s madness brought it to a finish in 1898. Their attachment was deep and was pursued throughout the country. During the years of passion Rodin executed sculptures of numerous couples in the throes of desire. The most sensuous of these groups was The Kiss, sometimes considered his masterpiece. Originally conceived as the figures of Paolo and Francesca for The Gates of Hell, it exposed him to numerous scandals.

Discords and triumphs

In spite of his success, Rodin was often in conflict with the Institute of France, the national art academy, with the public, and even with the Parliament. He devoted a decade to executing four monuments honouring the landscape painter Claude Lorrain, President Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina, and the writers Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, and each of the four monuments was challenged. In Nancy, France, the Claude statue and, in Buenos Aires, the President Sarmiento caused riots. The conflicts over the Victor Hugo and the Balzac were even more serious.

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In 1886 he received the order for the monument to Hugo for the Panthéon, France’s hall of its great men. The nudity depicted in the work caused such shock that he had to abandon the project. It was 1909 before another Victor Hugo, also nude but seated, was installed at the gallery of the Palais-Royal, although it had been intended for the Luxembourg Gardens. In 1891, Rodin was commissioned to portray Balzac for the Society of Men of Letters. He gave himself over completely to massive research designed to translate the several Balzac portraits into sculpture. He obtained the exact measurements of the novelist’s body by finding his former tailor. After much conjecture and experimentation to find an appropriate posture for the statue, he finally conceived of the writer as partly draped. The concisely designed model resembled a menhir, or upright prehistoric altar stone, foreshadowing the simplicity of modern art. The artist’s delays and his design for the statue brought on a legal dispute with the society, and, when the model was shown at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1898, it generated a violent debate in which the sculptor was defended by Georges Clemenceau, the future premier of France. Finally Rodin reimbursed the society and took back the model. The statue, cast in bronze, was not erected until 1939, in the crossroads of the Montmartre section of Paris.

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris featured a pavilion in which 150 of Rodin’s sculptures and numerous drawings were displayed, testifying to the international scope of his fame. After it closed, he had his works transported to a property that he had bought at Meudon in 1896. His residence there became a vast workshop where he employed a legion of assistants amid an endless stream of “favourites” who passed as his students. He was by then less a sculptor than an entrepreneur of sculpture. He himself executed only models, of which he made many, while searching for the form that suited him. Casting in bronze was the domain of specialists, but he also delegated the hewing of marble to others, to be executed under his direction but not by him. He was assisted in this “industrial” enterprise by a series of secretaries, including for a brief period the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

After 1900 Rodin’s worldwide success attracted abundant orders for portrait busts from the United States, Germany, Austria, England, and France. He enjoyed great renown in England, where he had numerous friends and which he often visited. In 1902 he was carried in triumph by students at a banquet in his honour in London. In 1907 he went to London for the inauguration of his monument to the poet William Henley at Westminster Abbey, and he—along with the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns and the U.S. writer Mark Twain—was made a doctor honoris causa at Oxford University. In May 1908, King Edward VII of England visited him at his workshop in Meudon.

In the same month Rodin also rented a floor in one of the most beautiful 18th-century Parisian mansions, the Hôtel Biron, which was surrounded by an immense garden. Eventually he occupied the entire premises under an agreement by which the French state agreed to acquire and preserve the mansion as a Rodin museum in return for his donation to the state of all his works. These negotiations were endangered, however, by the self-serving intrigues of the last of his great favourites, an American who became duchess of Choiseul. They were furthered by Judith Cladel, who became his chronicler and who worked to see that the negotiations were successful, and by his last secretary, Marcelle Tirel, who defended him from the covetousness of women who tried to coax away his legacy. The purchase of the mansion and the donation of Rodin’s goods was finally completed in 1916. The museum is constituted as an autonomous organization maintained by sales of castings from plaster casts that he left. On the day of Rodin’s burial a solemn service was celebrated in his honour at Westminster Abbey in London.

To his sculpture, Rodin added, during his lifetime, book illustrations, dry-point etchings, and innumerable drawings of nudes, principally female. He also had literary pretensions and produced several writings with the help of friends. He was enamoured of the art of the Middle Ages, and among his major efforts was the book Les Cathédrales de France (1914; Cathedrals of France, 1965).

Assessment

At the beginning of the 20th century Rodin was famous throughout the world and long had been revered as a modern-day Michelangelo, a titan of sculpture, an incarnation of the power of inspired genius. Even his prodigious sensuality was excused as a symbol of his Olympian stature. Three-quarters of a century later, however, criticism had become less uniform, pointing to the elements in his work that belie his early life as a decorative sculptor and the concomitant lack of formal discipline. Nonetheless, he exerted an immense influence on sculpture, and his numerous students from many countries helped to spread his style. His example was particularly fruitful for later French sculptors such as Charles Despiau, Aristide Maillol, and Antoine Bourdelle.

Most major museums own copies of his works, and museums in Paris, Philadelphia, and Tokyo are dedicated to him. Rodin’s prime contribution was in bringing Western sculpture back to what always had been its essential strength, a knowledge and sumptuous rendering of the human body. His evocations of great men, such as his George Bernard Shaw and Nijinsky, are uniformly brilliant.