Rodin: The shape of things
In the winter of 1875 Auguste Rodin was 35 years old and riding the train from Brussels, where he was earning his keep decorating public buildings, to Italy, where he was beginning a lifelong habit of collecting artwork. The coach stopped in Reims, in northeastern France, and he had a good look at its famed mediaeval Cathedral of Notre Dame.
Thirty-three years later, when he was 68, he placed together two larger-than-life casts of of the same right hand and called the result “The Cathedral”. By then he had become the most celebrated sculptor of his era, and yet for every acknowledgement of his unparallelled sensitivity in wringing human emotion from clay and plaster and stone and metal, it seemed there was a dear price to pay.
Born in Paris on November 12,1840, François-Auguste-René Rodin was schooled in math as well as drawing at La Petite École and soon uncovered a knack for sculpting. He failed three times to enter L’École des Beaux Arts, though, and had to make a living working with decorators.
In 1862 his sister Marie died and Auguste was so stricken by grief that he spent several months among the Fathers of the Holy Sacrament. Two years later he was back decorating – Les Goblins theatre showed his hallmarks – and at the same time met Rose Beuret. She would never leave his side; he would often leave hers.
The 1865 Salon des Artistes Français had no room for his sculpture “Man with a Broken Nose”, but Rodin persevered, now working from the Hotel Païva on the Champs-Elysées. The following year Rose gave birth to his son, Auguste-Eugène Beuret, but they weren’t married and he never recognised the boy as his own
After a stint in the National Guard that was abbreviated by his short-sightedness, Rodin had his first exhibition in 1871 and began working with the Belgian sculptor Antoine-Joseph Van Rasbourg, helping renovate the Brussels stock exchange and decorate the royal palace.
In 1875, the year he first took note of the Reims cathedral, he finally saw “Man with a Broken Nose” accepted at the Salon, and after visiting Italy created his groundbreaking piece “The Age of Bronze” (at left), inspired by Michelangelo.
When it was shown in Paris, though, he was accused of casting his figure from life since it looked so realistic to some, who swore he must have plunged a live boy in plaster. Others, ironically, found it shoddily sculpted, but in fact Rodin refused to smooth out his fingerprints and tool marks because he wanted people to sense the artistic process.
Such controversies would always dog him, but this sculpture was bought by the French government in 1880 just the same, and it also commissioned him to forge a gate for the planned Museum of Decorative Arts. It would be fashioned “The Gates of Hell”. He was provided with a special studio in the Dépôt des Marbres de l’Etat, which he maintained for the rest of his life, one of several in fact.
For the portal to the underworld, Rodin took as his starting point Ghilberti’s “Gates of Paradise” and as his inspiration Dante Aligheri’s “The Divine Comedy”, utilising imagery directly from “The Inferno”. He stirred in emotions from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Flowers of Evil”, and created from there.
The museum was never built, but Rodin continued to work on “The Gates”, executing countless studies while never finishing the whole, and many of his most famous pieces were derived from smaller reliefs contained within it.
“The Thinker” began life as part of “The Gates of Hell”. Much smaller then, it rested atop the doors and served as the focal point, the strain of the sitter’s muscles a paradox in light of his meditative passivity. Rodin initially regarded the figure as Dante himself, but it’s come to be loved and endlessly copied as the perfect symbol of intellect and contemplation.
“The Kiss” also began “in Hell”, though it was never incorporated into the final monument. The smoochers on the portal’s lower left side are Paolo and Francesca, from “The Inferno”, captured at the moment when, reading side by side, they realise they’re in love.
First exhibited in 1887, the sculpture’s overt passion was a shock, but tempers eased to admiration within a year and the government commissioned a marble version, now in the Musée Rodin. Outside are the original “Thinker” and, opposite it, the never-quite-finished “Gates of Hell”, seen below with Rodin and Rose Beuret posed in front.
Unveiled years earlier, “The Thinker” had perhaps given fair warning. Before he installed a bronze version at the Pantheon, Rodin displayed a plaster cast, and it was promptly hacked to bits by a vandal with a hatchet. The City of Paris, the work’s intended owner, refused to accept it, acutely aware of public discomfort over its raw nakedness.
Society’s anxieties about Rodin’s work were an echo of the emotional upheavals in his personal life. He had many affairs, all suffered through by his lifelong companion Rose. In 1881 he met Camille Claudel. His turbulent relationship with his talented student turned mistress ended in her being committed to a mental asylum, where she remained, never again sculpting, until her death in 1943.
Rodin’s 1891 homage to Victor Hugo, seen here, commissioned for the Luxembourg Gardens, had to undergo a series of alterations before it was accepted. His sculpture of Balzac was the subject of more heated debate that same year.
To be continued.
Admirers of Rodin are just putting the finishing touches to a new website that promises to be comprehensive. Meanwhile there is much to see online thanks to the Cantor Foundation and the Musée Rodin itself.
