“I have come to know that Geometry is at the very heart of feeling, and that each expression of feeling is made by a movement governed by Geometry. Geometry is everywhere in Nature. This is the concert of Nature.”

– Auguste Rodin

François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917) was a French sculptor^[1] generally considered the founder of modern sculpture.^[2] He was schooled traditionally and took a craftsman-like approach to his work. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell.

Many of Rodin’s most notable sculptures were criticized, as they clashed with predominant figurative sculpture traditions in which works were decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic. Rodin’s most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory. He modeled the human body with naturalism, and his sculptures celebrate individual character and physicality. Although Rodin was sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, he refused to change his style, and his continued output brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.

From the unexpected naturalism of Rodin’s first major figure – inspired by his 1875 trip to Italy – to the unconventional memorials whose commissions he later sought, his reputation grew, and Rodin became the preeminent French sculptor of his time. By 1900, he was a world-renowned artist. Wealthy private clients sought Rodin’s work after his World’s Fair exhibit, and he kept company with a variety of high-profile intellectuals and artists. His student, Camille Claudel, became his associate, lover, and creative rival. Rodin’s other students included Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brâncuși, and Charles Despiau. He married his lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, in the last year of both their lives. His sculptures suffered a decline in popularity after his death in 1917, but within a few decades his legacy solidified. Rodin remains one of the few sculptors widely known outside the visual arts community.

Formative years[edit]

Rodin was born in 1840 into a working-class family in Paris, the second child of Marie Cheffer and Jean-Baptiste Rodin, who was a police department clerk.^[3] He was largely self-educated,^[4] and began to draw at age 10. Between ages 14 and 17, he attended the Petite École, a school specializing in art and mathematics where he studied drawing and painting. His drawing teacher Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran believed in first developing the personality of his students so that they observed with their own eyes and drew from their recollections, and Rodin expressed appreciation for his teacher much later in life.^[5] It was at Petite École that he met Jules Dalou and Alphonse Legros.

In 1857, Rodin submitted a clay model of a companion to the École des Beaux-Arts in an attempt to win entrance; he did not succeed, and two further applications were also denied.^[6] Entrance requirements were not particularly high at the Grande École,^[7] so the rejections were considerable setbacks. Rodin’s inability to gain entrance may have been due to the judges’ Neoclassical tastes, while Rodin had been schooled in light, 18th-century sculpture. He left the Petite École in 1857 and earned a living as a craftsman and ornamenter for most of the next two decades, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments.

Rodin’s sister Maria, two years his senior, died of peritonitis in a convent in 1862, and Rodin was anguished with guilt because he had introduced her to an unfaithful suitor. He turned away from art and joined the Catholic order of the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament. Saint Peter Julian Eymard, founder and head of the congregation, recognized Rodin’s talent and sensed his lack of suitability for the order, so he encouraged Rodin to continue with his sculpture. Rodin returned to work as a decorator while taking classes with animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. The teacher’s attention to detail and his finely rendered musculature of animals in motion significantly influenced Rodin.^[8]

In 1864, Rodin began to live with a young seamstress named Rose Beuret (born in June 1844),^[9] with whom he stayed for the rest of his life, with varying commitment. The couple had a son named Auguste-Eugène Beuret (1866–1934).^[10] That year, Rodin offered his first sculpture for exhibition and entered the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, a successful mass producer of objets d’art. Rodin worked as Carrier-Belleuse’ chief assistant until 1870, designing roof decorations and staircase and doorway embellishments. With the arrival of the Franco-Prussian War, Rodin was called to serve in the French National Guard, but his service was brief due to his near-sightedness.^[11] Decorators’ work had dwindled because of the war, yet Rodin needed to support his family, as poverty was a continual difficulty for him until about the age of 30.^[12] Carrier-Belleuse soon asked him to join him in Belgium, where they worked on ornamentation for the Brussels Stock Exchange.

Rodin planned to stay in Belgium a few months, but he spent the next six years outside of France. It was a pivotal time in his life.^[12] He had acquired skill and experience as a craftsman, but no one had yet seen his art, which sat in his workshop since he could not afford castings. His relationship with Carrier-Belleuse had deteriorated, but he found other employment in Brussels, displaying some works at salons, and his companion Rose soon joined him there. Having saved enough money to travel, Rodin visited Italy for two months in 1875, where he was drawn to the work of Donatello and Michelangelo. Their work had a profound effect on his artistic direction.^[13] Rodin said, “It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture.”^[14] Returning to Belgium, he began work on The Age of Bronze, a life-size male figure whose naturalism brought Rodin attention but led to accusations of sculptural cheating – its naturalism and scale was such that critics alleged he had cast the work from a living model. Much of Rodin’s later work was explicitly larger or smaller than life, in part to demonstrate the folly of such accusations.

n 1864, Rodin submitted his first sculpture for exhibition, The Man with the Broken Nose, to the Paris Salon. The subject was an elderly neighborhood street porter. The unconventional bronze piece was not a traditional bust, but instead the head was “broken off” at the neck, the nose was flattened and crooked, and the back of the head was absent, having fallen off the clay model in an accident. The work emphasized texture and the emotional state of the subject; it illustrated the “unfinishedness” that would characterize many of Rodin’s later sculptures.^[28] The Salon rejected the piece.

Early figures: the inspiration of Italy

In Brussels, Rodin created his first full-scale work, The Age of Bronze, having returned from Italy. Modeled after a Belgian soldier, the figure drew inspiration from Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, which Rodin had observed at the Louvre. Attempting to combine Michelangelo’s mastery of the human form with his own sense of human nature, Rodin studied his model from all angles, at rest and in motion; he mounted a ladder for additional perspective, and made clay models, which he studied by candlelight. The result was a life-size, well-proportioned nude figure, posed unconventionally with his right hand atop his head, and his left arm held out at his side, forearm parallel to the body.

In 1877, the work debuted in Brussels and then was shown at the Paris Salon. The statue’s apparent lack of a theme was troubling to critics – commemorating neither mythology nor a noble historical event – and it is not clear whether Rodin intended a theme.^[29] He first titled the work The Vanquished, in which form the left hand held a spear, but he removed the spear because it obstructed the torso from certain angles. After two more intermediary titles, Rodin settled on The Age of Bronze, suggesting the Bronze Age, and in Rodin’s words, “man arising from nature”.^[30] Later, however, Rodin said that he had had in mind “just a simple piece of sculpture without reference to subject”.^[30]

Its mastery of form, light, and shadow made the work look so naturalistic that Rodin was accused of surmoulage – having taken a cast from a living model. Rodin vigorously denied the charges, writing to newspapers and having photographs taken of the model to prove how the sculpture differed. He demanded an inquiry and was eventually exonerated by a committee of sculptors. Leaving aside the false charges, the piece polarized critics. It had barely won acceptance for display at the Paris Salon, and criticism likened it to “a statue of a sleepwalker” and called it “an astonishingly accurate copy of a low type”.^[30] Others rallied to defend the piece and Rodin’s integrity. The government minister Turquet admired the piece, and The Age of Bronze was purchased by the state for 2,200 francs – what it had cost Rodin to have it cast in bronze.^[30]

A second male nude, St. John the Baptist Preaching, was completed in 1878. Rodin sought to avoid another charge of surmoulage by making the statue larger than life: St. John stands almost 6 feet 7 inches (2.01 m). While The Age of Bronze is statically posed, St. John gestures and seems to move toward the viewer. The effect of walking is achieved despite the figure having both feet firmly on the ground – a technical achievement that was lost on most contemporary critics.^[31] Rodin chose this contradictory position to, in his words, “display simultaneously…views of an object which in fact can be seen only successively”.^[32]

Despite the title, St. John the Baptist Preaching did not have an obviously religious theme. The model, an Italian peasant who presented himself at Rodin’s studio, possessed an idiosyncratic sense of movement that Rodin felt compelled to capture. Rodin thought of John the Baptist, and carried that association into the title of the work.^[32] In 1880, Rodin submitted the sculpture to the Paris Salon. Critics were still mostly dismissive of his work, but the piece finished third in the Salon’s sculpture category.^[32]

Regardless of the immediate receptions of St. John and The Age of Bronze, Rodin had achieved a new degree of fame. Students sought him at his studio, praising his work and scorning the charges of surmoulage. The artistic community knew his name.

The Gates of Hell

A commission to create a portal for Paris’ planned Museum of Decorative Arts was awarded to Rodin in 1880.^[16] Although the museum was never built, Rodin worked throughout his life on The Gates of Hell, a monumental sculptural group depicting scenes from Dante’s Inferno in high relief. Often lacking a clear conception of his major works, Rodin compensated with hard work and a striving for perfection.^[33]

He conceived The Gates with the surmoulage controversy still in mind: “…I had made the St. John to refute [the charges of casting from a model], but it only partially succeeded. To prove completely that I could model from life as well as other sculptors, I determined…to make the sculpture on the door of figures smaller than life.”^[33] Laws of composition gave way to the Gates’ disordered and untamed depiction of Hell. The figures and groups in this, Rodin’s meditation on the condition of man, are physically and morally isolated in their torment.^[34]

The Gates of Hell comprised 186 figures in its final form.^[34] Many of Rodin’s best-known sculptures started as designs of figures for this composition,^[8] such as The Thinker, The Three Shades, and The Kiss, and were only later presented as separate and independent works. Other well-known works derived from The Gates are Ugolino, Fallen Caryatid Carrying her Stone, Fugit Amor, She Who Was Once the Helmet-Maker’s Beautiful Wife, The Falling Man, and The Prodigal Son.

The Thinker (originally titled The Poet, after Dante) was to become one of the most well-known sculptures in the world. The original was a 27.5-inch (700 mm) high bronze piece created between 1879 and 1889, designed for the Gates‘ lintel, from which the figure would gaze down upon Hell. While The Thinker most obviously characterizes Dante, aspects of the Biblical Adam, the mythological Prometheus,^[16] and Rodin himself have been ascribed to him.^[35][36] Other observers de-emphasize the apparent intellectual theme of The Thinker, stressing the figure’s rough physicality and the emotional tension emanating from it.^[37]

The Burghers of Calais

The town of Calais had contemplated a historical monument for decades when Rodin learned of the project. He pursued the commission, interested in the medieval motif and patriotic theme. The mayor of Calais was tempted to hire Rodin on the spot upon visiting his studio, and soon the memorial was approved, with Rodin as its architect. It would commemorate the six townspeople of Calais who offered their lives to save their fellow citizens.

During the Hundred Years’ War, the army of King Edward III besieged Calais, and Edward ordered that the town’s population be killed en masse. He agreed to spare them if six of the principal citizens would come to him prepared to die, bareheaded and barefooted and with ropes around their necks. When they came, he ordered that they be executed, but pardoned them when his queen, Philippa of Hainault, begged him to spare their lives. The Burghers of Calais depicts the men as they are leaving for the king’s camp, carrying keys to the town’s gates and citadel.

Rodin began the project in 1884, inspired by the chronicles of the siege by Jean Froissart.^[38] Though the town envisioned an allegorical, heroic piece centered on Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the eldest of the six men, Rodin conceived the sculpture as a study in the varied and complex emotions under which all six men were laboring. One year into the commission, the Calais committee was not impressed with Rodin’s progress. Rodin indicated his willingness to end the project rather than change his design to meet the committee’s conservative expectations, but Calais said to continue.

In 1889, The Burghers of Calais was first displayed to general acclaim. It is a bronze sculpture weighing two short tons (1,814 kg), and its figures are 6.6 ft (2.0 m) tall.^[38] The six men portrayed do not display a united, heroic front;^[39] rather, each is isolated from his brothers, individually deliberating and struggling with his expected fate. Rodin soon proposed that the monument’s high pedestal be eliminated, wanting to move the sculpture to ground level so that viewers could “penetrate to the heart of the subject”.^[40] At ground level, the figures’ positions lead the viewer around the work, and subtly suggest their common movement forward.^[41]

The committee was incensed by the untraditional proposal, but Rodin would not yield. In 1895, Calais succeeded in having Burghers displayed in their preferred form: the work was placed in front of a public garden on a high platform, surrounded by a cast-iron railing. Rodin had wanted it located near the town hall, where it would engage the public. Only after damage during the First World War, subsequent storage, and Rodin’s death was the sculpture displayed as he had intended. It is one of Rodin’s best-known and most acclaimed works.^[38]

Commissions and controversy

The Société des Gens des Lettres, a Parisian organization of writers, planned a monument to French novelist Honoré de Balzac immediately after his death in 1850. The society commissioned Rodin to create the memorial in 1891, and Rodin spent years developing the concept for his sculpture. Challenged in finding an appropriate representation of Balzac given the author’s rotund physique, Rodin produced many studies: portraits, full-length figures in the nude, wearing a frock coat, or in a robe – a replica of which Rodin had requested. The realized sculpture displays Balzac cloaked in the drapery, looking forcefully into the distance with deeply gouged features. Rodin’s intent had been to show Balzac at the moment of conceiving a work^[43] – to express courage, labor, and struggle.^[44]

When Balzac was exhibited in 1898, the negative reaction was not surprising.^[35] The Société rejected the work, and the press ran parodies. Criticizing the work, Morey (1918) reflected, “there may come a time, and doubtless will come a time, when it will not seem outre to represent a great novelist as a huge comic mask crowning a bathrobe, but even at the present day this statue impresses one as slang.”^[8] A modern critic, indeed, claims that Balzac is one of Rodin’s masterpieces.^[45]

The monument had its supporters in Rodin’s day; a manifesto defending him was signed by Monet, Debussy, and future Premier Georges Clemenceau, among many others.^[46] In the BBC series Civilisation, art historian Kenneth Clark praised the monument as “the greatest piece of sculpture of the 19th Century, perhaps, indeed, the greatest since Michelangelo.”^[47] Rather than try to convince skeptics of the merit of the monument, Rodin repaid the Société his commission and moved the figure to his garden. After this experience, Rodin did not complete another public commission. Only in 1939 was Monument to Balzac cast in bronze and placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the intersection with Boulevard Raspail.

Other works

The popularity of Rodin’s most famous sculptures tends to obscure his total creative output. A prolific artist, he created thousands of busts, figures, and sculptural fragments over more than five decades. He painted in oils (especially in his thirties) and in watercolors. The Musée Rodin holds 7,000 of his drawings and prints, in chalk and charcoal, and thirteen vigorous drypoints.^[48][49] He also produced a single lithograph.

Portraiture was an important component of Rodin’s oeuvre, helping him to win acceptance and financial independence.^[50] His first sculpture was a bust of his father in 1860, and he produced at least 56 portraits between 1877 and his death in 1917.^[51] Early subjects included fellow sculptor Jules Dalou (1883) and companion Camille Claudel (1884).

Later, with his reputation established, Rodin made busts of prominent contemporaries such as English politician George Wyndham (1905), Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw (1906), socialist (and former mistress of the Prince of Wales who became King Edward VII) Countess of Warwick (1908),^[52] Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1909), former Argentine president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1911).

His undated drawing Study of a Woman Nude, Standing, Arms Raised, Hands Crossed Above Head is one of the works seized in 2012 from the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt.^[53]