Auguste Rodin

• 1. Introduction

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  Auguste Rodin was born into a working-class family in Paris on the 12th of November 1840, and he died 77 years later on the 17th of November 1917 -- just five days after his birthday. Between those two dates, he produced works so unlike anything that came before them that critics accused him of cheating, committees rejected his designs, and the organizations that commissioned him demanded he change his vision. He almost always refused.

  Rodin is generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. Yet his path to that title was anything but certain. He was rejected three times by the national art school. He spent most of his twenties and thirties carving decorative objects just to survive. When he finally showed the world what he could really do, his first major figure was accused of being cast from a living model rather than sculpted. His Monument to Balzac was mocked in the press. His Burghers of Calais was displayed in a way he found offensive for years.

  What drove a craftsman who spent two decades producing architectural embellishments to eventually be compared -- in his own lifetime -- to Michelangelo? And what does it mean that a man who modeled the surfaces of clay with unmatched sensitivity could be so unmoved by the feelings of those closest to him? Those are the questions worth sitting with.

• 2. Rejection and Survival

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  In 1857, Rodin submitted a clay model to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris hoping to gain admission. The judges turned him away. He applied twice more, and was rejected both times. The entrance requirements at the school were not especially demanding, so those repeated rejections stung.

  His drawing teacher at the Petite École, Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, had shaped him in an unusual way. Lecoq believed in developing a student's personality first, so that they would observe the world through their own eyes and draw from memory rather than rigid formulas. Rodin later expressed real appreciation for that approach. But the judges at the Beaux-Arts had Neoclassical tastes, and Rodin's training had been rooted in the lighter aesthetic of 18th-century sculpture. That mismatch likely sealed his fate.

  For most of the next two decades, Rodin earned his living as a craftsman. He produced decorative objects and architectural embellishments -- roof decorations, staircase and doorway carvings. He worked as chief assistant to Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, a successful mass producer of objets d'art, and traveled with him to Brussels in 1871 to work on ornamentation for the Bourse Palace. He planned to stay a few months and ended up spending six years outside of France.

  His art sat in his workshop during those years. He could not afford to have it cast. The grief that shadowed his early adulthood was real and personal: his sister Maria died in 1862 of peritonitis in a convent, and Rodin blamed himself because he had introduced her to an unfaithful suitor. In his anguish, he briefly joined a Catholic order -- the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament. The founder and head of the congregation, Saint Peter Julian Eymard, recognized Rodin's talent and gently pushed him back toward sculpture.

• 3. Italy and the Awakening

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  Rodin had saved enough money by 1875 to travel to Italy for two months. What he found there changed him. He was drawn especially to Donatello and Michelangelo. Rodin later said, "It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture."

  Returning to Brussels, he began work on The Age of Bronze -- a life-size nude male figure modeled after a Belgian soldier. He had studied his model from every angle, at rest and in motion, climbing a ladder for additional perspective and examining clay studies by candlelight. The figure stood with its right hand atop its head and its left arm held out with the forearm parallel to the body. Rodin had drawn inspiration from Michelangelo's Dying Slave, which he had observed at the Louvre.

  When the work debuted in Brussels in 1877 and then appeared at the Paris Salon, critics did not know what to make of it. It bore no obvious mythological or historical theme. It looked so naturalistic that Rodin was formally accused of surmoulage -- taking a cast from a living model rather than sculpting the figure. He vigorously denied the charge, wrote to newspapers, had photographs taken of the model to show the differences. He demanded an inquiry. A committee of sculptors eventually exonerated him.

  Even cleared of the false charges, the piece divided critics sharply. One described it as "a statue of a sleepwalker". Another called it "an astonishingly accurate copy of a low type". But the government minister Turquet admired the work, and the French state purchased it for 2,200 francs -- the exact amount it had cost Rodin to have it cast in bronze. That exchange would soon open a door that transformed his career.

• 4. The Gates of Hell

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  Through Turquet's influence, Rodin won a commission in 1880 to create a portal for a planned museum of decorative arts in Paris. The museum was never built. Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell for the rest of his life.

  Conceived as a monumental sculptural group depicting scenes from Dante's Inferno in high relief, the Gates comprised 186 figures in its final form. Rodin had designed it with the surmoulage controversy still on his mind. He wanted to prove definitively that he could model from life just as well as any sculptor, and he deliberately made the figures smaller than life to put that question to rest.

  The Gates became a remarkable generative engine. Figures and groups developed for the portal eventually broke free from it and became independent works. The Thinker -- originally titled The Poet, in reference to Dante -- began as a 27.5-inch bronze figure designed for the lintel of the Gates, from which it would gaze down upon the figures below. The Kiss came from the same source. So did The Three Shades, Ugolino, Fugit Amor, The Falling Man, and The Prodigal Son.

  The Thinker is perhaps the most recognized sculpture in the world today. Rodin described how the figure thinks not only with its brain but with "every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes." Interpreters have associated the figure with Dante, with the Biblical Adam, with Prometheus, and with Rodin himself. A cast of The Thinker was placed at Rodin's own tomb in Meudon -- it was his wish that the figure serve as his headstone and epitaph.

• 5. Camille Claudel

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  In 1883, sculptor Alfred Boucher asked Rodin to supervise one of his courses during an absence. There, Rodin met an 18-year-old student named Camille Claudel. What followed was one of the most consequential and damaging relationships in the history of art.

  Claudel modeled for many of Rodin's figures and assisted on his commissions while developing her own sculptures. Her Bust of Rodin was displayed at the 1892 Salon and received critical acclaim. She was a gifted sculptor in her own right, and the two were described as a creative rival as much as a collaborator. The relationship was passionate but stormy.

  Rodin refused to leave Rose Beuret, who had lived with him since 1864 and had borne his son. He had written to Beuret during one absence from her: "I think of how much you must have loved me to put up with my caprices...I remain, in all tenderness, your Rodin." He and Claudel shared an atelier at the Chateau de l'Islette in the Loire, but the situation grew increasingly intolerable. Claudel and Rodin parted in 1898.

  What happened to Claudel afterward is one of the grimmer facts connected to Rodin's life. Several years after their separation, she suffered an alleged nervous breakdown. Her family had her confined to an institution, where she remained for 30 years, until her death in 1943. Doctors repeatedly tried to explain to her mother and brother that she was sane. They were not persuaded. Rodin, by then famous and celebrated, did not intervene.

• 6. The Burghers and Balzac

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  Two of Rodin's greatest public commissions share a common thread: both ended with the commissioning bodies rejecting or bitterly resisting his vision.

  Rodin pursued the Calais memorial himself, interested in the medieval motif and the patriotic weight of the story. The six burghers had offered their lives during the Hundred Years' War to save the town's population: Edward III had agreed to spare Calais if six principal citizens would come to him bareheaded, barefooted, and with ropes around their necks, ready to die. His queen, Philippa of Hainault, ultimately begged him to pardon them. Rodin began work in 1884, inspired by the chronicles of Jean Froissart. He wanted to show all six men individually, each absorbed in his own fear and resolve, rather than presenting an allegorical, heroic group centered on the eldest, Eustache de Saint-Pierre.

  The Burghers of Calais was first displayed to general acclaim in 1889. The bronze figures stand 6.6 feet tall and the completed work weighs 2 short tons. Rodin then proposed removing the high pedestal entirely, wanting viewers to encounter the figures at ground level. The committee in Calais was furious. He would not yield. In 1895, the town placed the sculpture in front of a public garden on a high platform surrounded by a cast-iron railing. It was only after damage during the First World War, subsequent storage, and Rodin's death that the sculpture was finally installed as he had intended.

  The Balzac commission followed a similar arc. The Societe des Gens des Lettres hired Rodin in 1891 to memorialize the novelist Honore de Balzac. Rodin spent years producing studies -- portraits, nude figures, figures in frock coats, figures in a monk's robe. The final work showed Balzac cloaked in drapery, looking forcefully into the distance with deeply gouged features. Rodin intended to capture the novelist at the moment of conceiving a work -- to express courage, labor, and struggle. When the monument was exhibited in 1898, the Societe rejected it outright. A manifesto defending Rodin was signed by Monet, Debussy, and future Premier Georges Clemenceau, among others. Rodin repaid the Societe his commission and moved the figure to his garden. Monument to Balzac was not cast in bronze until 1939, and was placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the intersection with Boulevard Raspail.

• 7. Fame and Its Complications

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  By 1900, Rodin's reputation was fully established. He set up a pavilion of his work near the Exposition Universelle in Paris that year, and wealthy private clients from around the world sought his portraits. His income from portrait commissions alone totaled what was probably 200,000 francs a year.

  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke stayed with Rodin in 1905 and 1906, doing administrative work and later writing a laudatory monograph on him. The country estate in Meudon that Rodin and Beuret had purchased in 1897 hosted King Edward VII, dancer Isadora Duncan, and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. A British journalist who visited in 1902 remarked on the property's complete isolation and noted what he called "a striking analogy between its situation and the personality of the man who lives in it."

  Rodin moved to the city in 1908, renting the main floor of the Hotel Biron, an 18th-century townhouse. Beuret remained in Meudon. He had known Rose Beuret for 53 years before he finally married her, on the 29th of January 1917. She died two weeks later, on the 16th of February. Rodin's own health was failing. In January of that year, he had suffered weakness from influenza. On the 16th of November, his physician announced that congestion of the lungs had caused great weakness and that his condition was grave. Rodin died the next day at his villa in Meudon.

  In his last months, Rodin had asked permission to stay in the Hotel Biron -- by then a museum of his works. The director refused. His secretary Marcell Tirel published a book in 1923 alleging that Rodin's death had been hastened by cold, and by the lack of heat at Meudon.

• 8. Legacy and Forgeries

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  Rodin willed to the French state his studio and the right to cast from his plasters. The Musee Rodin opened in 1919 at the Hotel Biron and now holds more than 6,000 sculptures and 7,000 works on paper. The French order Legion d'honneur made him a Commander. In 1907, the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary doctorate.

  The generation of sculptors who passed through his workshop reads like a roll call of early 20th-century art: Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brancusi, Camille Claudel, Charles Despiau, Malvina Hoffman, Carl Milles, Gustav Vigeland, and others. Brancusi later rejected Rodin's legacy, but Henry Moore acknowledged his seminal influence on his own work. Rodin himself promoted other sculptors, calling Ivan Mestrovic "the greatest phenomenon amongst sculptors".

  The ease with which bronze sculptures can be reproduced has also made Rodin one of the most-faked artists in the world -- a survey of expert opinion placed him in the top ten. He fought against forgeries as early as 1901. In the early 1990s, French authorities discovered a massive forgery operation that led to the conviction of art dealer Guy Hain. France has promulgated laws since 1956 limiting reproduction to twelve casts from an artist's plasters; as a result, The Burghers of Calais exists in fourteen cities. A Rodin work with a verified provenance sold for US$4.8 million in 1999. His bronze Eve, grand modele sold for $18.9 million at a Christie's auction in New York in 2008.

  Rodin's popularity dipped in the three decades after his death as aesthetic values shifted, but since the 1950s his reputation has risen again. The sense of incompletion in works like The Walking Man -- assembled around 1899-1900 from a damaged torso and the lower extremities of an earlier St. John statuette -- directly influenced the increasingly abstract sculpture of the 20th century.