Auguste Rodin
How a Cracked Sculpture Informed Auguste Rodin’s Artistic Philosophy
The father of modern sculpture Auguste Rodin’s first works were shaped by the context of his surroundings and means quite literally. He never had an easy path to becoming an artist and was rejected at multiple critical points in his life. Born in 1840 in Paris, France, Rodin suffered distress at an early age. Not aware of his poor eyesight, it went undiagnosed, resulting in many setbacks in school. Unable to decipher lessons in math and science on the blackboard, he retreated to drawing. His nearsightedness allowed him to see his progress when drawing, which would kickstart his obsession with art (1).
Auguste would attend art school at Petite Ecole, where his poor eyesight was finally discovered by a professor. Rodin excelled at drawing and by 1857 and won the school’s drawing prize. His desire was to do more than draw. He wanted to bring his art to life in three dimensions. He excelled in all areas of art except for one primary skillset required of a sculptor. The rendering of the human form. To grow his skill set, Rodin needed to attend the Grande Ecole (2). He applied and passed the drawing exams but failed sculpture courses and was denied entry. Auguste re-applied to get in over successive semesters and was denied twice more when he decided to give up on art school altogether. In 1858 needing to support himself, the eighteen-year-old Rodin took a job stirring plaster and creating molds for building ornaments. Even though he was a cog in an assembly line, he learned to work with plaster. Disappointed and depressed, he questioned whether he’d ever become an artist (3).
Graduating from decorative plaster, Rodin would later work as a trade sculptor and practice his art in the morning before work and at night. The first studio he rented was a barely a converted horse stable. It consumed what little money Auguste had. This left him no money to hire models to sculpt from. He made do with amateurs willing to accept what small payment he could offer. A Greek Handyman Bibi was happy to provide his services to Rodin and would sit for him in exchange for some spare change. Bibi had a broken nose and a face that Rodin described as “Hideous.” It took him 18 months to complete a bust of Bibi in 1863 (4).
Around the time Rodin was about to submit the bust to be showcased in the Paris Salon, the temperature in his makeshift studio dipped below freezing, and the back of the terra-cotta sculpture broke off and shattered. Contemplating how the bust now looked, he decided it actually looked better this way. More of a mask than a traditional bust. In Rachel Corbett’s book, You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin, she described Rodin’s art beginning with circumstance and constraints. “The mask now bore the reality of Bibi and Rodin’s impoverishment on its surface, expressing the coldness of life in the most literal way.” (5)
Auguste submitted the work as a mask versus a bust. It was rejected multiple times. For Rodin, the mask was a creative breakthrough. It would come to inform his fundamental philosophy behind his art. That beauty was about truth and not perfection. He summed up this philosophy in his statement, “There is nothing ugly in art except that which is without character (6).” Ultimately perfection is something people have a hard time relating to. But people can empathize with wrinkles and scars. At the time, sculptors created monuments of military heroes or mythological characters. While Rodin sculpted the ordinary or the ugly, a renegade move on his part. It was in line with his creative philosophy, but critics rejected him for it.
He left Paris for Florence, Italy, to see and study the work of the masters such as Michelangelo. Studying every contour and curve, he noticed how expressive decisions were made with a form that differed significantly from the Greek statues he studied at the Louvre. Upon Auguste’s return to France, inspired he began to work his next major sculpture, The Age of Bronze. He found a model in a young Belgian Soldier. He tried to capture the soldier in precise detail. He spent three months on one leg alone. It took him a year and a half to complete the entire sculpture. For the first time in 1877, he was accepted into the Salon. The French government even asked to purchase a version of the sculpture for the city. Upon the Salon’s opening, the critics railed against the work, stating this was a study, an accurate copy, and not a real work of sculpture. In other words, not a work of art. The government sent in experts to validate whether or not Rodin created a cast from the model himself. He begged officials to look at photographs of the model who had much more significant proportions than the actual sculpture proving it couldn’t have been a plaster copy (7).
After three years of protest, a newly appointed arts undersecretary re-issued the order for the city to have a version of the bronze sculpture and in an act of goodwill, gave the artist a new commission. The commission was to design the entrance for the new museum of decorative arts that was to be built. Auguste wanted to prove himself with this commission and would embark on his most ambitious piece yet. He’d propose the most immense monumental doors Paris had ever seen. A twenty-foot large bronze gate with over two hundred figures inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. With the commission, the government also granted him a new studio in their Marble Depot. However, the compensation for the commission was small, and he still had to work his day job in a porcelain factory. He would spend a decade manufacturing vases while working on this new project. The work was The Gates of Hell, which would become his life long all-consuming work of art.
A work that August placed at the top of the gates was an anonymous man, engaging not in a heroic act but in contemplation. In an unorthodox fashion, he started with the torso. What began as a 27-inch figure was later tripled in size when cast in bronze, originally titled The Poet, possibly after Dante or Baudelaire. The work he would rename as The Thinker was his depiction of what it meant to be an artist. A common man who struggled in labor to produce work (8). The gates would continue to be worked on and re-worked as Rodin was a non-stop tinkerer. A man with many projects, sketches, and dreams, rarely bringing things to completion.
When Rodin turned 50, he confused critics more than ever before. Rodin never apprenticed with a living master and had a rough quality to his work. Instead of trying to smooth out mistakes, he highlighted them, which was in tune with his artistic philosophy of expressing character not perfection.
The French impressionists, such as Paul Cezanne, were deeply moved by his work and defended in public. He began working on a monument to Balzac that should have taken him 18 months but eventually took him seven years. Which would earn him the admiration of the English. Rodin captured Balzac in the most honest form possible. Depicting how Balzac looked in his study when gripped in thought, hair disordered and casually dressed. People reacted to its debut in 1898, in horror believing Rodin had turned their beloved author into a monster. Rodin’s friends came to the defense of statue including, Oscar Wilde, Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Baudelaire. All the controversy over the statue fueled offers to buy the sculpture. To add additional drama, Auguste decided not to sell. Although not popular in France, the depiction of Balzac began to build a fan base in England.
English artists began migrating to Paris to study with Rodin, and demand for his teaching became so high that he was able to open up his own school in 1899. Still, somewhat of an artistic outcast in France, he spent time trying to raise funds to participate in the 1900’s World’s Fair. The city had not invited him to show at the event but stated they might allow him to show his work on municipal land provided he could provide his own pavilion. The city council was very slow, approving his request to use a patch of land at the intersection of Cour-la-Reine and Avenue Montaigne. A sympathetic politician who moonlighted as a poet found a way to push the proposal through.
Not a missing a beat, Rodin spent all of his savings and got loans from three bankers to build a six-sided, Louis XVI-style pavilion to resemble a green-house so light could hit his sculptures in the right way when viewed by the public. This project so all-consuming he closed his newly created school to see it through (9). Rodin managed to install 165 sculptures in the pavilion and was his largest exhibition to date, this included Balzac, The Thinker, and various sculpted fragments of body parts.
Although the pavilion had little to no traffic from the public, it attracted other artists, poets, and photographers, which lead to even more commissions such as a bust requested by George Bernard Shaw. Through a new relationship, he also managed to start selling sculptures to a wealthy industrialist who donated them to the Metropolitan Museum.
After half a century of rejection, the city of Paris agreed to erect The Thinker in front of the Pantheon’s grand staircase. It was seen as a make-good for France’s mistreatment of the artist (10).
References
- Christoforou, Marie. “8 Things You Should Know about Auguste Rodin.” Artsper Magazine, 29 Aug. 2018, blog.artsper.com/en/a-closer-look/8-things-know-auguste-rodin/.
- Corbett, Rachel. You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin. W.W. Norton and Company, 2017, p. 9.
- Idem, p. 10.
- Idem, p. 32.
- Idem, p. 33.
- Idem, p. 34.
- Idem, p. 37.
- Idem, p. 40.
- Idem, p. 59.
- Idem, p.141.
Originally published at https://blog.viktorbezic.com.
