Auguste Rodin
1840-1917

There are some reputations in the art world that are beyond dispute. These artists' influence is so seminal, their accomplishments so signal, that, even in the act of rejecting them, their critics reiterate their importance. Among these titans is the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. While still attracting controversy a century later, Rodin's work is so central to Western art that only Michelangelo is better known as a sculptor, and every sculptor since has had to struggle to escape from being eclipsed beneath his formidable shadow. Amazingly, he seemed to appear out of nowhere, with nothing in his background or birth to indicate that a genius had arrived in the streets of Paris .

Auguste Rodin was born on November 12, 1840 , the only son of a minor police official and his wife. As a young boy, he performed poorly in school, possibly because of his near-sightedness, but quickly developed an interest in art. This led his father to enroll him at the government-supported Ecole Speciale de Dessin et de Mathematiques, a training institution for artisans and industrial designers. Though like other aspiring artists, Auguste longed to attend the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, he failed its entrance examination three times. Oddly enough, while he passed the drawing part of the exam, he consistently failed the sculpting portion. However, this may well have been a blessing in disguise; his friend and fellow sculptor Jules Dalou later said, “That Rodin, he was the lucky one, he never attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts!”

Rodin was able to obtain lessons with the great master, Antoine-Louis Barye, but later admitted that Barye was so unassuming that Rodin failed to realize what a great privilege it was to study with him and squandered his opportunity. Auguste's artistic future was further compromised when, in an apparent emotional response to his older sister Marie's sudden death shortly after joining a convent, he abruptly entered a monastery. The bust he modeled of the order's founder convinced them both that his vocation was artistic rather than religious, however, and he left after only a few months.

He worked as an artisan for various ornament makers and decorative sculptors doing architectural ornamentation for years while he struggled to sculpt on his own time and money. His first significant piece, Man with a Broken Nose , presented initially as a plaster mask, was rejected by the Paris Salon in 1864. Deciding his luck might be better with a full-sized sculpture, Rodin hired a young model, Rose Beuret, who would be his companion for the remainder of her life and bear his only child. Unfortunately, this first statue was damaged in a move and later destroyed.

In 1870, in response to the Franco-Prussian War, Rodin moved to Belgium where he worked in the atelier of the prominent sculptor Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. Rodin said later that the 6 years he spent in Brussels were a time of immense growth for him as a sculptor. He began making money with his own sculpture while continuing to support himself with architectural decoration. Near the end of that time, he took a trip to Italy where his discovery of the works of Michelangelo also became a major influence on his future work. Returning to Paris in 1876, he began work on a life-size sculpture of a nude male eventually called Age of Bronze . While he had already exhibited in the Salon in 1875, Age of Bronze , exhibited in 1877, was his first piece to attract notice - unfortunately, the wrong kind. The piece was so realistic that critics accused him of casting from life. Fortunately, a number of his fellow sculptors came to his defense and convinced M. Turquet, the head of the Ministry of Art, to purchase the piece for the state. Rodin went on to sculpt another full figure, St. John the Baptist , which would become enormously influential on modern art after he removed the head and arms and titled it The Walking Man .

Still unable to support himself as a sculptor, Rodin continued to do decorative work, at one point designing vases for the national porcelain factory at Sevres. Then, through his acquaintance with Turquet, Rodin received the commission to create a pair of bronze doors for a planned museum of decorative arts. Though the museum was never built, the doors became Rodin's famous The Gates of Hell , a massive piece of sculpture based on Dante's Inferno and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal . At that time, Rodin was embarking on a tempestuous relationship with sculptor Camille Claudel, at one time a student of his, and this provided the impetus for much of the great work that came out of his atelier over the following decade. Many of his most famous sculptures derived from work done on The Gates , including Eternal Springtime , Eve , The Fallen Caryatid Beneath Her Stone , The Kiss , and The Thinker. During that exceptionally fruitful period, Rodin would also work on the commissions for The Burghers of Calais , two monuments to Victor Hugo, and his monumental and most innovative work, Balzac . The Balzac was a revelation, but sparked so much controversy that it ended Rodin's desire to take on public monuments. A visiting Oscar Wilde wrote about the piece: “The leonine head of a fallen angel, with a dressing gown. The head is gorgeous, the dressing gown an entirely unshaped cone of white plaster. People howl with rage over it.”

For most of the rest of his life, Rodin would focus on running his ateliers and modeling commissioned portrait busts, including those of such well-known figures as George Bernard Shaw, Joseph Pulitzer, Lady Sackville-West, Isadora Duncan, and Gustav Mahler. In 1917, with World War I raging, a stroke-ridden Rodin finally married his faithful Rose Beuret, who died of pneumonia only 3 weeks later. In November of the same year, Rodin himself succumbed to illness. The couple were buried together in a vault in the garden of their villa at Meudon beneath a copy of The Thinker .

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