Auguste Rodin

French, 1840 - 1917

BiographyFrench sculptor renowned for his expressive handling and themes. Having failed the exam to the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, three times, Rodin began his artistic career as an artisan. He studied with Antoine-Louis Barye and Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran whose techniques of drawing from life and memory were to remain a part of Rodin's practice throughout his career. He worked as an ornamental mason, as an assistant to Albert Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, and for the Sèvres porcelain manufactures. A trip to Italy in 1875 introduced Rodin to Michelangelo.

Rodin's art inspired controversy; The Age of Bronze (bronze; London, Tate) was initially condemned as cast from life and then admired and purchased by the state in 1878. In his doors for the proposed Musée des Arts Décoratifs, The Gates of Hell (plaster; Paris, Mus. d'Orsay), Rodin transformed Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise (Florence baptistery) into a tumultuous fin de siècle vision of Dante's journey through the circles of hell in The Divine Comedy. Many of Rodin's free-standing works derive from this ensemble, including The Thinker, The Kiss, and Carnal Love. Many versions of his sculptures exist; The Burghers of Calais, a monument to commemorate the 14th-century liberation of the city from the English, was installed both in Calais in 1895 and in Victoria Tower Gardens, London, in 1913.

Rodin was asked to produce many commemorative statues of important artistic figures: the authors Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac (both plasters were rejected by their literary society commissioners); and the pictorial artists Puvis de Chavannes, Claude Lorrain, and Jules Bastien-Lepage. He was also inspired by music and dance, in particular by Hanako, a Japanese dancer who performed at the 1889 Exposition Universelle, and by Nijinsky, whose performance of Debussy's L'Après-midi d'un faune in Paris in 1912 Rodin greatly admired. His fragment sculptures, often no more than an isolated limb, have particularly intrigued contemporary scholars.

Themes of sexuality and creativity inspired much of Rodin's œuvre and are expressed through physical torsion and explicit studies both in life drawings and in sculptures like Iris and the auto-erotic Balzac. These aesthetic engagements with passion have filtered into the mythology of the artist's personality, evocatively constructed in Rainer Maria Rilke's monograph. Rodin was to influence generations of sculptors, including assistants, like Émile-Antoine Bourdelle. There were more fraught relationships with women artists including Camille Claudel and Gwen John. Rodin employs expressive techniques of modelling and composition eloquently embodying the passion and anxiety of the fin de siècle.

O'Mahony, Claire I. R.. "Rodin, Auguste." In The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/opr/t118/e2253 (accessed March 7, 2012).

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