Auguste Rodin
The father of modern sculpture.
Rodin made The Thinker, The Kiss and The Gates of Hell. He allowed bodies to be unfinished and fragmentary and gave sculpture new life.
Auguste Rodin was born in 1840 in Paris into a working-class family. His father was a clerk in the police. Rodin attended a school of decorative art but was refused admission to the École des Beaux-Arts three times. For almost twenty years he worked instead as a craftsman and assistant to other sculptors, making ornaments for buildings. When his sister died in 1862 he spent a period in a monastery, but returned to art.
In 1864 he met the seamstress Rose Beuret, who became his lifelong companion. They had a son but did not marry until 1917, a few weeks before her death. In the 1870s Rodin worked in Brussels and travelled to Italy, where Michelangelo’s work made a deep impression on him. His first major sculpture, The Age of Bronze (1877), was so lifelike that he was accused of having cast it from a living model.
In 1880 he was commissioned to make a doorway for a planned museum. He chose subjects from Dante’s Inferno and called the work The Gates of Hell. He worked on it for the rest of his life, and it was never finished. Many of his best-known works grew out of the gates: The Thinker, which originally represented Dante, and The Kiss, a couple from Dante’s poem. He also made The Burghers of Calais (1884–95) and a monument to Honoré de Balzac, which those who had commissioned it rejected in 1898 because it was considered too crude.
Rodin modelled in clay and left the surface uneven so that light plays across it. He readily left works as fragments, such as a headless torso, and let figures emerge from a rough block of stone. Among his pupils and collaborators was the sculptor Camille Claudel, who was also his lover for many years. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke was for a time his secretary. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900 Rodin had his own pavilion and became world-famous.
Rodin died in 1917. He had donated his works to the French state, and the Musée Rodin in Paris opened in 1919. He is regarded as the father of modern sculpture, because he broke with the smooth, idealised academic style.