Auguste Rodin

Anyone asking who was Auguste Rodin usually begins with a surprise: the most famous sculptor of the modern age was, by the standards of official Paris, a failure well into his thirties. Francois Auguste Rene Rodin was born on November 12, 1840, in Paris, the second child of Jean-Baptiste Rodin, a clerk in the police prefecture, and Marie Cheffer, a former seamstress from Lorraine. The family lived modestly in the Mouffetard quarter on the Left Bank ^[1].

A weak student who struggled with reading and spelling, Rodin was sent at age ten to board with an uncle in Beauvais, then returned to Paris at fourteen to enter the Petite Ecole, a state school training craftsmen in drawing and modeling. There he studied under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, a teacher who drilled students in drawing from memory, a discipline Rodin credited for the rest of his life ^[1][2].

His attempts to enter the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the gateway to an official career, failed three times between 1857 and 1858. The rejections, apparently based on his modeling in a style out of step with the prevailing neoclassical taste, closed the standard route to state commissions and Salon prestige ^[2]. A further blow came in 1862 when his sister Maria died; grief drove Rodin briefly into a Catholic order, the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament, whose founder, Father Pierre-Julien Eymard, recognized his talent and encouraged him to return to art ^[1].

For almost twenty years Rodin earned his living as a craftsman. He modeled ornaments, masks, and decorative figures for commercial workshops, and from 1864 worked in the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, a prolific and fashionable sculptor of decorative art. When the Franco-Prussian War disrupted the Paris trade in 1870, Rodin followed Carrier-Belleuse to Brussels, where he stayed for six years, collaborating on architectural sculpture including decoration for the Brussels Bourse ^[2][3].

The turning point came in 1875, when savings from the Brussels years allowed a two-month journey to Italy. Standing before the work of Michelangelo and Donatello in Florence and Rome, Rodin later said the encounter freed him from academicism. On his return he modeled a life-size male nude, exhibited in Brussels in 1877 and then in Paris as The Age of Bronze. The figure was so anatomically alive that critics accused him of casting it directly from the model's body, a charge of fraud he fought with photographs and testimony from the sitter, a Belgian soldier named Auguste Neyt ^[2][3].

The scandal made his name. The French state eventually purchased a bronze cast of the figure, and in 1880 the Ministry of Fine Arts gave Rodin the commission that shaped the rest of his career: a monumental bronze portal for a planned museum of decorative arts, its subject drawn from Dante's Inferno. The Gates of Hell was never installed in the sculptor's lifetime and remained in his studio for thirty-seven years, but it became a laboratory from which he extracted many of his most famous independent works, including The Thinker and The Kiss ^[3][4].

Any account of Auguste Rodin achievements starts with the works spun out of the Gates. The Thinker, conceived around 1880 as a seated figure of the poet brooding over the damned below him, was enlarged in 1904 and became one of the most reproduced sculptures in the world; a monumental cast was placed outside the Pantheon in Paris in 1906 ^[4]. The Kiss, showing the doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca from Dante, began as a group on the portal before Rodin removed it, judging its tenderness out of place among the damned; a large marble version commissioned by the French state was shown at the 1898 Salon ^[3][4].

In 1884 the city of Calais asked Rodin for a monument to Eustache de Saint-Pierre, the fourteenth-century burgher who offered his life to save the town from Edward III. Rodin instead proposed all six hostages together, barefoot, in sackcloth, with ropes at their necks, each man meeting death in his own way. The Burghers of Calais, unveiled in 1895, replaced the conventional single hero on a high pedestal with a group of ordinary men in visible anguish, and Rodin argued the figures should stand nearly at ground level among the townspeople ^[2][5].

His most radical public work was the monument to Balzac, commissioned by the Societe des Gens de Lettres in 1891. After years of studies, Rodin presented in 1898 a massive robed figure, the novelist's features roughed out above a dressing gown treated almost as a single geological mass. The society rejected it, critics mocked it, and Rodin withdrew the plaster to his home at Meudon; a bronze was finally erected in Paris in 1939, decades after his death. Later sculptors, among them Brancusi, treated the Balzac as the starting point of modern sculpture ^[2][5]. Rodin's international standing was sealed in 1900, when a pavilion devoted entirely to his work, mounted alongside the Paris Exposition Universelle at the Place de l'Alma, drew collectors and museums from across Europe and America ^[3].

Rodin modeled in clay and left carving and casting largely to skilled assistants and founders, a standard practice he pushed to unusual scale: his studios employed dozens of plaster casters, marble carvers, and enlargers, among them the young Antoine Bourdelle and, for a time, Charles Despiau ^[2][5].

What set the work apart was the surface and the fragment. Rodin kept the marks of his fingers in the clay, letting light break across the bronze in a way contemporaries compared to Impressionist painting. He treated the partial figure, a torso without arms, a pair of clasped hands, as a finished work rather than a study, an idea reinforced by his lifelong study of damaged antiquities. He also recombined casts of existing figures into new groups, an assemblage method that anticipated practices of twentieth-century art ^[4][5].

He was equally prolific on paper. Thousands of late drawings, many made without looking down at the sheet while the model moved freely around the studio, record the human figure with a speed and frankness that startled contemporaries. He supervised photographers who documented his work, using photography to study, edit, and publicize his sculpture ^[1][4].

In 1864 Rodin met Rose Beuret, a young seamstress who became his lifelong companion, the model for early works, and the guardian of his plasters through every move and crisis. Their son, Auguste-Eugene Beuret, was born in 1866; Rodin never legally recognized him. Rodin and Rose finally married on January 29, 1917, in Meudon, after fifty-three years together. She died two weeks later, on February 16 ^[1][3].

The most consequential relationship outside that union was with Camille Claudel, a gifted sculptor who entered his studio around 1883 as a student and assistant and became his collaborator, model, and lover. Their liaison, stormy and creatively charged, ended around 1892, and the definitive break came later in the decade. Claudel's own career collapsed amid mental illness, and she was confined to an asylum in 1913 for the last thirty years of her life, a fate that has shaped much later writing about Rodin ^[1][6].

Fame brought Rodin an international circle. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke served as his secretary in 1905 and 1906 and wrote an influential monograph on him; society figures, dancers, and heads of state sat for portrait busts. In 1895 Rodin bought the Villa des Brillants at Meudon, southwest of Paris, which became his home, workshop, and private museum, and from 1908 he also rented, then occupied, the ground floor of the Hotel Biron in Paris ^[1][3].

After 1900 Rodin produced fewer large new compositions and worked increasingly through his assistants, issuing marbles, bronzes, and enlargements of earlier inventions for a worldwide clientele. Honors accumulated: he succeeded Whistler as president of the International Society of Sculptors, Painters and Gravers in 1903, and Oxford University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1907 ^[2][3].

His last great campaign was for his own posterity. In 1916, after strokes had weakened him, Rodin executed three deeds of gift transferring to the French state his entire holdings: sculptures, plasters, drawings, photographs, archives, and his personal collection of antiquities and paintings, which included works by Van Gogh and Monet. In exchange the state undertook to create a museum of his work at the Hotel Biron ^[3][7].

Rodin died at Meudon on November 17, 1917, five days after his seventy-seventh birthday, during a bitter wartime winter. He was buried beside Rose in the garden at Meudon, beneath a cast of The Thinker. The Musee Rodin opened at the Hotel Biron in 1919 and remains, with the Meudon estate, the principal repository of his work ^[3][7].

Basic Auguste Rodin facts only hint at his afterlife. Because he willed the state his plasters along with the right to cast from them, original Rodin bronzes have continued to be produced posthumously under French legal limits of twelve casts per model, and his work anchors museums from Philadelphia, home of the largest Rodin collection outside Paris, to Tokyo and Seoul ^[7][8].

His influence ran in two directions. Assistants and followers such as Bourdelle and Despiau carried forward the modeled figure, while the next generation, including Brancusi, who briefly worked in his orbit and famously left because nothing grows in the shadow of great trees, defined modern sculpture partly by reacting against him. The expressive fragment, the unworked block, and the sculpture without a pedestal all passed from his studio into the common language of twentieth-century art ^[2][5].

Any serious Auguste Rodin biography must also reckon with reassessment. Since the 1980s, scholars and filmmakers have re-examined Camille Claudel's contribution and the cost of their relationship, while exhibitions marking the centenary of his death in 2017, in Paris and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, confirmed his standing as the figure who returned sculpture to the center of European art ^[6][8].