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Auguste
Rodin Wiki
Auguste Rodin[p]
(born François-Auguste-René Rodin; 12 November 1840 – 17
November 1917) was a French sculptor.
Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern
sculpture,[1]
he did not set out to rebel against the past. He was schooled
traditionally, took a craftsman-like approach to his work, and desired
academic recognition,[2]
although he was never accepted into Paris's foremost school of art.
Sculpturally, he possessed a unique ability to model a complex,
turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Many of
Rodin's most notable sculptures were roundly criticized during his
lifetime. They clashed with the predominant figure sculpture tradition,
in which works were decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic. Rodin's
most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology
and allegory,
modeled the human body with realism, and celebrated individual
character and physicality. Rodin was sensitive of the controversy
surrounding his work, but refused to change his style. Successive works
brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.
From the unexpected realism of his first major figure—inspired by his
1875 trip to Italy—to the unconventional memorials whose commissions he
later sought, Rodin's reputation grew, such that he 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.
He married his life-long companion, Rose Beuret, in the last year of
both their lives. His sculpture 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. Biography
[edit] Formative years
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. He was largely self-educated,[3]
and began to draw at ten. Between ages 14 and 17, Rodin 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 such that they observed with their own eyes and drew from their
recollections. Rodin still expressed appreciation for his teacher much
later in life.[4]
There he first met Jules Dalou and Alphonse Legros.
Rodin submitted a clay model of a companion to the Grand École in 1857 in an attempt
to win entrance; he did not succeed, and two further applications were
also denied.[5]
Given that entrance requirements at the Grand École were not
particularly high,[6]
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, eighteenth-century
sculpture. Leaving the Petite École in 1857, Rodin would earn 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. Her brother was anguished, and felt guilty
because he had introduced Maria to an unfaithful suitor. Turning away
from art, Rodin briefly joined a Catholic order. Father Peter Julian Eymard recognized Rodin's talent and,
sensing his lack of suitability for the order, encouraged Rodin to
continue with his sculpture. He returned to work as a decorator, while
taking classes with animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. The teacher's
attention to detail—his finely rendered musculature of animals in
motion—significantly influenced Rodin.[7]
In 1864, Rodin began to live with a young seamstress named Rose
Beuret, with whom he would stay—with ranging commitment—for the rest of
his life. The couple bore a son, Auguste-Eugène Beuret (1866–1934).[8]
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 National Guard, but his service was
brief due to his near-sightedness.[9]
Decorators' work had dwindled because of the war, yet Rodin needed to
support his family—poverty was a continual difficulty for Rodin until
about the age of 30.[10]
Carrier-Belleuse soon asked Rodin to join him in Belgium,
where they would work on ornamentation for Brussels' bourse.
Rodin planned to stay in Belgium a few months, but he spent the next
six years abroad. It was a pivotal time in Rodin's life.[10]
He had acquired skill and experience as a craftsman, but no one had yet
seen his art, which sat in his workshop, since Rodin could not afford
castings. Though his relationship with Carrier-Belleuse deteriorated, he
found other employment in Brussels, displayed 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.[11]
Rodin said, "It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic
sculpture."[12]
Returning to Belgium, he began work on The Age of Bronze, a life-size male figure whose realism
brought Rodin attention but led to accusations of sculptural cheating.
[edit] Artistic independence
Rose Beuret and Rodin returned to Paris in 1877, moving into a small
flat on the Left Bank. Misfortune surrounded Rodin: his
mother, who had wanted to see her son marry, was dead, and his father
was blind and senile, cared for by Rodin's sister-in-law, Aunt Thérèse.
Rodin's eleven-year-old son Auguste, possibly developmentally delayed,
was also in the ever-helpful Thérèse's care. Rodin had essentially
abandoned his son for six years,[13]
and would have a very limited relationship with him throughout his
life. Father and son now joined the couple in their flat, with Rose as
caretaker. The charges of fakery surrounding The Age of Bronze
continued. Rodin increasingly sought more soothing female companionship
in Paris, and Rose stayed in the background.
Rodin earned his living collaborating with more established sculptors
on public commissions, primarily memorials and neo-baroque architectural pieces in the style of
Carpeaux.[14]
In competitions for commissions he submitted models of Denis
Diderot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Lazare
Carnot, all to no avail. On his own time, he worked on studies
leading to the creation of his next important work, St. John the
Baptist Preaching.
In 1880, Carrier-Belleuse—now art director of the Sèvres
national porcelain factory—offered Rodin a part-time
position as a designer. The offer was in part a gesture of
reconciliation, and Rodin accepted. That part of Rodin which appreciated
eighteenth-century tastes was aroused, and he immersed himself in
designs for vases and table ornaments that brought the factory renown
across Europe.[15]
The artistic community appreciated his work in this vein, and Rodin was
invited to Paris Salons by such friends
as writer Léon Cladel. During his
early appearances at these social events, Rodin seemed shy;[16]
in his later years, as his fame grew, he displayed the loquaciousness
and temperament for which he is better known. French statesman Leon Gambetta expressed a desire to meet Rodin,
and the sculptor impressed him when they met at a salon. Gambetta spoke
of Rodin in turn to several government ministers, likely including
Edmund Turquet, the Undersecretary of the Ministry of Fine Arts, whom
Rodin eventually met.[16]
Rodin's relationship with Turquet was rewarding: through him, he won
the 1880 commission to create a portal for a planned museum of
decorative arts. Rodin dedicated much of the next four decades to his
elaborate Gates of Hell, an
unfinished portal for a museum that was never built. Many of the
portal's figures became sculptures in themselves, including Rodin's most
famous, The Thinker and The Kiss. With the museum
commission came a free studio, granting Rodin a new level of artistic
freedom. Soon, he stopped working at the porcelain factory; his income
came from private commissions.
In 1883, Rodin agreed to supervise a course for sculptor Alfred Boucher in his absence, where he met the 18-year-old
Camille Claudel. The two formed a passionate but stormy
relationship and influenced each other artistically. Claudel inspired
Rodin as a model for many of his figures, and she was a talented
sculptor, assisting him on commissions.
Although busy with The Gates of Hell, Rodin won other
commissions. He pursued an opportunity to create a historical monument
for the town of Calais. For a monument to French author Honoré de Balzac, Rodin was chosen in 1891. His execution
of both sculptures clashed with traditional tastes, and met with
varying degrees of disapproval from the organizations that sponsored the
commissions. Still, Rodin was gaining support from diverse sources that
propelled him toward fame.
In 1889, the Paris Salon invited Rodin to be a judge on its artistic
jury. Though Rodin's career was on the rise, Claudel and Beuret were
becoming increasingly impatient with Rodin's "double life". Claudel and
Rodin shared an atelier at a small old castle,
but Rodin refused to relinquish his ties to Beuret, his loyal companion
during the lean years, and mother of his son. During one absence, Rodin
wrote to Beuret, "I think of how much you must have loved me to put up
with my caprices…I remain, in all tenderness, your Rodin."[17]
Claudel and Rodin parted in 1898.[18]
Claudel suffered a nervous breakdown several years later and was
confined to an institution by her family until her death.
In 1864, Rodin submitted his first sculpture for exhibition, The
Man with the Broken Nose, to the Paris Salon. The subject was an elderly
neighbourhood 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.[19]
The Salon rejected the piece.
[edit]
Early
figures: the inspiration of Italy
In Brussels, Rodin created his first full-scale work, The Age of Bronze, having returned from Italy. Modelled
by 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.[20]
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".[21]
Later, however, Rodin said that he had had in mind "just a simple piece
of sculpture without reference to subject".[21]
Its mastery of form, light, and shadow made the work look so
realistic 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".[21]
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.[21]
St. John the Baptist Preaching (1878)
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'
7'' (2 m). While the 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 physical impossibility, and a technical achievement that was
lost on most contemporary critics.[22]
Rodin chose this contradictory position to, in his words, "display
simultaneously…views of an object which in fact can be seen only
successively".[23]
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.[23]
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.[23]
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.
[edit] The Gates of Hell
A commission to create a portal for Paris' planned Museum of Decorative Arts was
awarded to Rodin in 1880.[14]
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.[24]
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."[24]
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.[25]
The Gates of Hell comprised 186 figures in its final form.[25]
Many of Rodin's best-known sculptures started as designs of figures for
this composition,[7]
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, Fugit Amor, 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,[14]
and Rodin himself have been ascribed to him.[26][27]
Other observers de-emphasize the apparent intellectual theme of The
Thinker, stressing the figure's rough physicality and the emotional
tension emanating from it.[28]
[edit] The Burghers of
Calais
The town of Calais had contemplated an 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.[29]
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 tons (1,814 kg), and its
figures are 6.6 ft (2 m) tall.[29]
The six men portrayed do not display a united, heroic front;[30]
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".[31]
At ground level, the figures' positions lead the viewer around the
work, and subtly suggest their common movement forward.[32]
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 most well-known and acclaimed works.[29]
[edit] Commissions and
controversy
Rodin observing work on the monument to Victor Hugo at the studio of his
assistant Henri Lebossé in 1896
Commissioned to create a monument to French writer Victor
Hugo in 1889, Rodin dealt extensively with the subject of artist
and muse. Like many of Rodin's public commissions, Monument to
Victor Hugo was met with resistance because it did not fit
conventional expectations. Commenting on Rodin's monument to Victor
Hugo, The Times in 1909 expressed that "there is some show of
reason in the complaint that [Rodin's] conceptions are sometimes
unsuited to his medium, and that in such cases they overstrain his vast
technical powers".[33]
The 1897 plaster model was not cast in bronze until 1964.
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[34]—to
express courage, labor, and struggle.[35]
Monument to Balzac (1891–1898)
When Balzac was exhibited in 1898, the negative reaction was
not surprising.[26]
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."[7]
A modern critic, indeed, indicates that Balzac is one of Rodin's
masterpieces.[36]
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.[37]
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.
[edit] 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.[38][39]
He also produced a single lithograph.
Portraiture was an important component of Rodin's oeuvre, helping him
to win acceptance and financial independence.[40]
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.[41]
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), Austrian composer Gustav
Mahler (1909), former Argentinian president Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and
French statesman Georges Clemenceau (1911).
[edit] Aesthetic
A famous "fragment": The Walking Man
Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression
than with character and emotion.[42]
Departing with centuries of tradition, he turned away from the idealism
of the Greeks, and the decorative beauty of the Baroque
and neo-Baroque movements. His
sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, and
suggested emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the interplay
of light and shadow. To a greater degree than his contemporaries, Rodin
believed that an individual's character was revealed by his physical
features.[2]
Rodin's talent for surface modeling allowed him to let every part of
the body speak for the whole. The male's passion in The Kiss is
suggested by the grip of his toes on the rock, the rigidness of his
back, and the differentiation of his hands.[7]
Speaking of The Thinker, Rodin illuminated his aesthetic: "What
makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with
his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with
every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and
gripping toes."[43]
Sculptural fragments to Rodin were autonomous works, and he
considered them the essence of his artistic statement. His
fragments—perhaps lacking arms, legs, or a head—took sculpture further
from its traditional role of portraying likenesses, and into a realm
where forms existed for their own sake.[44]
Notable examples are The Walking Man, Meditation without Arms, and Iris,
Messenger of the Gods.
Rodin saw suffering and conflict as hallmarks of modern art.
"Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened beast, dying from
unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its passion."[27]
Charles Baudelaire echoed those themes,
and was among Rodin's favorite poets. Rodin enjoyed music, especially
the opera composer Gluck, and wrote a book about French cathedrals. He owned a
work by the as-yet-unrecognized Van Gogh, and admired the forgotten El Greco.[45]
[edit] Method
Instead of copying traditional academic postures, Rodin preferred to
work with amateur models, street performers, acrobats, strong men, and
dancers. In the atelier, his models moved about and took positions
without manipulation.[7]
Very devoted to his craft, Rodin worked constantly but not feverishly.
The sculptor made quick sketches in clay that were later fine-tuned,
cast in plaster, and forged into bronze or carved in marble. Rodin was
fascinated by dance and spontaneous movement. As France's best-known
sculptor, he had a large staff of pupils, craftsmen, and stone cutters
working for him, including the Czech sculptors Josef Maratka and Joseph
Kratina. Through his method of marcottage
(layering), he used the same sculptural elements time and time again,
under different names and in different combinations. Disliking the
formality of pedestals, Rodin placed many of his subjects around
rough rock to emphasize their immediacy and provide contrast.[46]
George Bernard Shaw sat for a portrait and gave an idea of Rodin's
technique: "While he worked, he achieved a number of miracles. At the
end of the first fifteen minutes, after having given a simple idea of
the human form to the block of clay, he produced by the action of his
thumb a bust so living that I would have taken it away with me to
relieve the sculptor of any further work." He described the evolution of
his bust over a month, passing through "all the stages of art's
evolution": first, a "Byzantine
masterpiece", then "Bernini intermingled", then an
elegant Houdon. "The hand of Rodin worked not as the
hand of a sculptor works, but as the work of Elan Vital. The Hand of God
is his own hand."[47]
[edit] Later years
By 1900, Rodin's artistic reputation was entrenched. Gaining exposure
from a pavilion of his artwork set up near the 1900 World's Fair (Exposition Universelle) in
Paris, he received requests to make busts of prominent people
internationally,[26]
while his assistants at the atelier produced duplicates of his works.
His income from portrait commissions alone totalled probably 200,000
francs a year.[48]
As Rodin's fame grew, he attracted many followers, including the German
poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and authors Octave Mirbeau, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar
Wilde.[30]
Rilke stayed with Rodin in 1905 and 1906, and did administrative work
for him; he would later write a laudatory monograph
on the sculptor. Rodin and Beuret's modest country estate in Meudon,
purchased in 1897, was a host to such visitors as King Edward, dancer Isadora Duncan, and harpsichordist
Wanda Landowska. Rodin moved to the city in 1908, renting
the main floor of the Hôtel
Biron, an eighteenth-century townhouse. He left Beuret in Meudon,
and began an affair with the American-born Duchesse de Choiseul.[49]
Among Rodin's overseas admirers were the transit magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes and the
historian Henry Brooks Adams;
Yerkes is reputed to have been the first American to own a Rodin
sculpture.[50]
After the turn of the century, Rodin was a regular visitor to Great
Britain, where he developed a loyal following by the beginning of the
First World War. He first visited England in 1881, where his friend, the
artist Alphonse Legros, had introduced him to the
poet William Ernest Henley. With his
personal connections and enthusiasm for Rodin's art, Henley was most
responsible for Rodin's reception in Britain.[51]
(Rodin later returned the favor by sculpting a bust of Henley that was used as the
frontispiece to Henley's collected works[52]
and, after his death, on his monument in London.[53])
Through Henley, Rodin met Robert Louis Stevenson and Robert Browning, in whom he found further support.[54]
Encouraged by the enthusiasm of British artists, students, and high
society for his art, Rodin donated a significant selection of his works
to the nation in 1914.
After the revitalization of the Société Nationale des
Beaux-Arts in 1890, Rodin served as the body's vice-president.[55]
In 1903, Rodin was elected president of the International Society of Painters,
Sculptors, and Engravers. He replaced its former president, James Abbott McNeill Whistler,
upon Whistler's death. His election to the prestigious position was
largely due to the efforts of Albert
Ludovici, father of English philosopher Anthony Ludovici.
During his later creative years, Rodin's work turned increasingly
toward the female form, and themes of more overt masculinity and
femininity.[26]
He concentrated on small dance studies, and produced numerous erotic
drawings, sketched in a loose way, without taking his pencil from
the paper or his eyes from the model. Rodin met American dancer Isadora Duncan in 1900, attempted to seduce her,[56]
and the next year sketched studies of her and her students. In July
1906, Rodin was also enchanted by dancers from the Royal Ballet of
Cambodia, and produced some of his most famous drawings from the
experience.[57]
Fifty-three years into their relationship, Rodin married Rose Beuret.
The wedding was 29 January 1917, and Beuret died two weeks later, on 16
February.[58]
Rodin was ill that year; in January, he suffered weakness from influenza,[59]
and on 16 November his physician announced that "congestion of the
lungs has caused great weakness. The patient's condition is grave."[58]
Rodin died the next day, age 77, at his villa in Meudon, Île-de-France, on the outskirts of
Paris.[5]
A cast of The Thinker was placed next to his tomb in Meudon; it
was Rodin's wish that the figure serve as his headstone
and epitaph.[60]
In 1923, Marcell Tirel, Rodin's secretary, published a book alleging
that Rodin's death was largely due to cold, and the fact that he had no
heat at Meudon. Rodin requested permission to stay in the Hotel Biron, a museum of his works, but the
director of the museum refused to let him stay there.[61][62]
[edit] Legacy
Rodin willed to the French state his studio and the right to make
casts from his plasters. Because he encouraged the edition of his
sculpted work, Rodin's sculptures are represented in many public and
private collections. The Musée
Rodin was founded in 1916 and opened in 1919 at the Hôtel
Biron, where Rodin had lived, and it holds the largest Rodin
collection, with more than 6,000 sculptures and 7,000 works on paper.
The relative ease of making reproductions has also encouraged many
forgeries: a survey of expert opinion placed Rodin in the top ten
most-faked artists.[63]
Rodin fought against forgeries of his works as early as 1901, and since
his death, many cases of organized, large-scale forgeries have been
revealed. A massive forgery was discovered by French authorities in the
early 1990s and led to the conviction of art dealer Guy Hain.[64]
To deal with the complexity of bronze reproduction, France has
promulgated several laws since 1956 which limit reproduction to twelve
casts—the maximum number that can be made from an artist's plasters and
still be considered his work. As a result of this limit, The Burghers of Calais, for example, is
found in fourteen cities.[29]
In the market for sculpture, plagued by fakes, the value of a piece
increases significantly when its provenance can be established. A Rodin
work with a verified history sold for US$4.8 million in 1999,[65]
and Rodin's bronze Eve, grand modele—version sans rocher sold
for $18.9 million at a 2008 Christie's
auction in New York.[66]
Art critics concerned about authenticity have argued that taking a cast
does not equal reproducing a Rodin sculpture—especially given the
importance of surface treatment in Rodin's work.[67]
The Thinker (1879–1889) is among the most recognized
works in all of sculpture.
During his lifetime, Rodin was compared to Michelangelo,[27]
and was widely recognized as the greatest artist of the era.[68]
In the three decades following his death, his popularity waned with
changing aesthetic values.[68]
Since the 1950s, Rodin's reputation has re-ascended;[45]
he is recognized as the most important sculptor of the modern era, and
has been the subject of much scholarly work.[68][69]
The sense of incompletion offered by some of his sculpture, such as The
Walking Man, influenced the increasingly abstract sculptural forms
of the twentieth century.[70]
Though highly honoured for his artistic accomplishments, Rodin did not
spawn a significant, lasting school of followers. His notable students
included Antoine Bourdelle, Charles Despiau, the American Malvina Hoffman, and his mistress Camille Claudel, whose sculpture received praise in France.
The French order Légion d'honneur made him a Commander,
and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
Rodin restored an ancient role of sculpture—to capture the physical
and intellectual force of the human subject[69]—and
he freed sculpture from the repetition of traditional patterns,
providing the foundation for greater experimentation in the twentieth
century. His popularity is ascribed to his emotion-laden representations
of ordinary men and women—to his ability to find the beauty and pathos
in the human animal. His most popular works, such as The Kiss and
The Thinker, are widely used outs External links
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