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| François Auguste René Rodin |
The Grandma has been gone to the library to search more information about Auguste Rodin, the French sculptor who is considered the progenitor of modern sculptor and died on a day like today in 1917.
The Grandma loves sculpture and studying Rodin is something very special. She has remembered one of her first visits to Paris when she visited the Musée Rodin and could appreciate the works of this French genius face to face.
Before going to the library, The Grandma has read the last chapter of Katherine Mansfield's The Garden Party and Other Stories.
François Auguste René Rodin (12 November 1840-17 November 1917) was a French sculptor.
Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, 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, although he was never accepted into Paris's foremost school of art.
Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Many of his most notable sculptures were criticized during his lifetime. They clashed with predominant figurative sculpture traditions, 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 to the controversy surrounding his work, but refused to change his style. Successive works brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.
More information: Musée Rodin
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, and 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. His students included Antoine
Bourdelle, Camille Claudel, Constantin Brâncuși, and Charles Despiau. He
married his lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, in the last year of both
their lives. His sculptures 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.
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| The Gates of Hell, Paris |
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, and began to draw at age 10. Between ages 14 and 17, he 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 so that they observed with their own eyes and drew from their recollections, and Rodin expressed appreciation for his teacher much later in life. It was at Petite École that he met Jules Dalou and Alphonse Legros.
In 1857, Rodin submitted a clay model of a companion to the École des Beaux-Arts in an attempt to win entrance; he did not succeed, and two further applications were also denied. Entrance requirements were not particularly high at the Grande École, so 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, 18th-century sculpture. He left the Petite École in 1857 and earned a living as a craftsman and ornamenter for most of the next two decades, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments.
In 1864, Rodin began to
live with a young seamstress named Rose Beuret, with whom he stayed for
the rest of his life, with varying commitment. The couple had a son
named Auguste-Eugène Beuret (1866–1934). 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.
More information: The Art Story
Rodin planned to stay in
Belgium a few months, but he spent the next six years outside of
France. It was a pivotal time in his life. He had acquired skill and
experience as a craftsman, but no one had yet seen his art, which sat in
his workshop since he could not afford castings. 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.
Rose Beuret and Rodin returned to Paris in 1877. Rodin earned his living collaborating with more established sculptors on public commissions, primarily memorials and neo-baroque architectural pieces in the style of Carpeaux. 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.
More information: Widewalls
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 18th-century tastes was aroused, and he
immersed himself in designs for vases and table ornaments that brought
the factory renown across Europe.
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; 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.
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| The Thinker, Paris |
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 as well as creating her own works. Her Bust of Rodin was displayed to critical acclaim at the 1892 Salon. Claudel and Rodin parted in 1898.
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.
Rodin was a naturalist,
less concerned with monumental expression than with character and
emotion. 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.
More information: My Modern Net
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 Thinker is suggested by the grip of his toes on the rock, the rigidness of his back, and the differentiation of his hands.
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. Notable examples are The Walking Man, Meditation without Arms, and Iris, Messenger of the Gods.
Instead of copying traditional academic postures, Rodin preferred his models to move naturally around his studio, despite their nakedness. The sculptor often made quick sketches in clay that were later fine-tuned, cast in plaster, and cast in bronze or carved from marble. Rodin's focus was on the handling of clay.
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 French order Légion d'honneur made him a Commander, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
More information: Artsy
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.
Auguste Rodin
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