Auguste Rodin (1840 - 1917) was a French sculptor generally regarded as the founder of modern sculpture. [1] Working outside the academic system that had repeatedly rejected him, he produced The Age of Bronze, The Burghers of Calais, The Kiss and the unfinished Gates of Hell, from which The Thinker derives. [2] He bequeathed his work and collections to the French state, forming the basis of the Musée Rodin in Paris.
Early life and training
François-Auguste-René Rodin was born in Paris on 12 November 1840 into a modest family. At fourteen he entered the Petite École, the school of decorative arts later known as the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs, where he studied drawing and modelling. [1] He applied three times to the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts and was refused each time.
For nearly two decades he worked as a craftsman and assistant, notably in the studio of the decorative sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse in Paris and Brussels, producing ornament for buildings rather than work of his own. [2] A journey to Italy in 1875 brought him into contact with the work of Michelangelo and Donatello, which reshaped his sense of what sculpted form could carry.
Breakthrough and major commissions
In 1877 Rodin exhibited a male nude, later titled The Age of Bronze, whose anatomical exactness led to accusations that he had cast it directly from a living model. [1] The controversy brought him attention, and the charge was eventually dismissed.
In 1880 the French state commissioned a monumental portal for a projected museum of decorative arts. The Gates of Hell, drawing on Dante's Inferno, occupied Rodin intermittently for the rest of his life and was never completed as a building element, but it served as a reservoir of figures that he enlarged into independent works, among them The Thinker, The Kiss and The Three Shades. [3]
The city of Calais commissioned a monument in 1884 to the townsmen who surrendered themselves to Edward III during the Hundred Years' War. Rodin's Burghers of Calais, completed in 1889, showed the six men worn and hesitant rather than heroic, and its proposed low placement at street level broke with monumental convention. [2] His 1898 Monument to Balzac, a rough-hewn figure wrapped in a cloak, was rejected by the society that commissioned it and is now considered a decisive step toward modern sculpture.
Studio, students and later years
Rodin's workshop employed numerous assistants and practitioners who enlarged, carved and cast his designs. Camille Claudel entered the studio in the 1880s as a pupil and collaborator and became his companion; she was also a sculptor of considerable originality in her own right, and their relationship ended painfully. [1] Rodin's lifelong partner Rose Beuret, with whom he had a son, was married to him only weeks before both died in 1917.
A pavilion devoted to his work at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris established his international standing, and honours followed, including the grades of the Legion of Honour and honorary doctorates from Oxford, Glasgow and Jena. [1] He died at Meudon on 17 November 1917.
Legacy
Rodin donated his sculptures, drawings, plasters and collections to France on condition that they be preserved and exhibited; the Musée Rodin opened at the Hôtel Biron in 1919 and continues to produce authorised bronze casts of his models. [3] His insistence on fragment, gesture and unfinished surface influenced sculptors from Bourdelle and Brancusi onward, and casts of The Thinker stand in museums and public spaces across the world. [2]