AUGUSTE RODIN
Posthumous cast at FAMART, Portugal (former cast at Atelier FAMART, France and Elliot Gantz and Co. Foundry, USA)

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)
(from the catalogue of Opera Gallery)

Auguste Rodin is regarded as the most remarkable sculptor of the 19th Century. An extraordinary creative and prolific French artist, Rodin was originally rejected from the prestigious art school, École des Beaux-Arts, turning him to one of the few self-taught French sculptors of his time. He is considered by many as the first Modern sculpture artist.

Born to a humble family in 1840 and slow to gain recognition, Rodin nonetheless won five of France’s largest commissions for monuments during the 1880s and 1890s (The Gates of Hell, The Burghers of Calais, Victor Hugo, The Kiss and Balzac). During these decades he produced grand public works and a vast oeuvre of drawings and small sculptures. By 1890 Rodin had become the most renowned sculptor in France and by 1900 he had achieved international recognition.

The start of his career was nevertheless challenging. At the age of 14, Rodin persuades his father to let him attend the Petite École. While learning traditional techniques, he practiced the skills of observation and drawing from memory spending much of his time sketching in the Louvre studying Greek antiques and Master sculptors. The numerous sketches and studies that he made in the early 1870s bear witness to his ongoing interest in the diverse models offered by different periods in art history.

Three failing attempts to past the entry exams to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts sent Rodin to pursue his artistic career outside of the formal academic channels. He started working in the studio of the ornamentalist Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, first in Paris, then in Brussels, where his skill became apparent.

In 1864 he met Rose Beuret, then aged 20, who became his lifelong companion. Despite numerous affairs throughout his life, Beuret remained by his side until her death in 1917. Rodin finally married her 2 weeks before she died.

1875 marked a turning point in Rodin’s public recognition. He exhibited in Paris Salon a piece titled Man with the Broken Nose. Rodin was extremely fond of this portrait, which he regarded as his ‘first good sculpture’. The acceptance of his work at the Salon was a victory in itself, finally being acknowledged by the artistic circles as a worthy artist by his own right. The same year, Rodin travelled to Italy where he discovered the works of Renaissance artists and in particular of Michelangelo. This discovery turned to be a decisive moment in his career leading to Rodin’s groundbreaking sculptures, introducing methods and techniques that were central to his own artistic aesthetics.

Rodin designed a life-size nude study as a tribute to Michelangelo named The Age of Bronze. Through that figure, an allusion to the third of the four ages of mankind, as described by the early Greek poet Hesiod, Rodin found his own approach and was already using the ‘multiple profiles technique‘ publicized by the press much later. The French government purchased a cast of The Age of Bronze for the sum of 2,000 francs in 1880, then commissioned Rodin to design a portal for a future Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy, Rodin designed The Gates of Hell, a project he would pursue for the rest of his life, without ever delivering it or seeing it cast in bronze. The Gates would remain a repertory of figures, constantly reworked, rearranged and modified. Many of Rodin most famous sculptures started as the composition design for the portal such as The Thinker, The Three Shades and The Kiss.

From The Age of Bronze onwards, Rodin preferred to depict a body in motion rather than to work from a fixed, academic pose. Rodin had a superb, unmatched gift for modelling clay and plaster. He began most of his sculptures by modelling small versions of them, which made them easier to handle and enabled him to pursue his creative idea without having to worry about technical constraints. For both small and large figures, he worked from the live model to develop a series of profiles. Only when the clay figure possessed the required movement he would proceed to make an image in plaster or another medium. Working while observing a life model played a fundamental role in Rodin’s creative process. There was no visual compromise nor stage effects, the nude was not ‘arranged in a pose’ as in Edgar Degas and Edouard Manet’s ‘studied’ painting.

Abandoning the practice of representing the body in its entirety, flawless in form, Rodin’s fragment thus earned its independence, broke away from the figure to which it had originally belonged and became a work of art in its own right. Such was the case with the clay model of Adel’s Torso, a small, strikingly sensual, partial figure, executed before 1884. The cast was used as the base on numerous works that followed; once completed with arms and legs for one of the figures on The Gates of Hell and on another occasion, modified and fitted with a head, it became the starting point for the female figure in Eternal Springtime. The female figure served as an ongoing inspiration as Rodin kept investigating its form using live models, dancers, fortune hunters, grandes dames, and aristocratic soulmates alongside his lifelong companion Rose Beuret and his decade-long lover Camille Claudel in his observations as represented by Crouching Woman and Iris, Messenger of the Gods. Chronologically the years 1880-1899 are considered Rodin’s greatest years of creation. In 1881 he modeled the figures Adam, Eve and The Thinker. The major exhibition titled ‘Claude Monet - Auguste Rodin’ took place at the Galerie Georges Petit in 1894. In 1897 The Monument to Victor Hugo was shown at the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.

‘Since I began,’ Rodin declared enthusiastically, ‘I have the impression that I know how to draw… and I know why my drawings have this intensity: it’s because I do not intervene. Between nature and paper, I eliminated talent. I do not reason. I simply let myself go.’ (Rodin - Les Figures d’Éros : Dessins et aquarelles 1890-1917, p. 50)

Rodin’s international reputation attracted a new affluent celebrity clientele, who soon commissioned works from him. Because of its refinement and elegance, Rodin often preferred to use marble for those portraits. Rodin’s international recognition continued to flourish and he was awarded numerous honorable titles, the highest being the Grand Officier of the Legion of Honour in 1910. In 1912 the Rodin Room was inaugurated at the Metropolitan Museum of New York. In 1916 a stroke left the artist in a sever condition. Subsequently Rodin offered to donate all his works to the French government on condition that the Hôtel Biron, where he had lived and worked for some years, is converted into a museum in his honour. The request was granted by the Senate and in 1919, two years after Rodin’s death, the Musée Rodin opened to the public.

Rodin admired the human body and once described his feelings when seeing a marble head of a young woman titled La Tête Warren: ‘It’s life itself. It embodies all that is beautiful, life itself, beauty itself. It is admirable. Those parted lips. I am not a man of Letters; hence I am unable to describe this truly great work of art. I feel but I cannot find the words that will give expression to what I feel. This is a Venus! You cannot imagine how much this Venus interests me. She is like a flower, a perfect jewel. So perfect that it is as disconcerting as nature itself. Nothing could describe it.’ (Interview with M. Rodin: A Praxiteles Venus, Morning Post, 28 May 1903)

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