Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is generally considered to be one of the founders of modern sculpture. While traditional sculpture prior to Rodin tended to be decorative, formulaic, or thematic, Rodin portrayed the human body with realism and celebrated individual character and physical features. Rodin was considered a naturalist who focused on character and emotion rather than on monumental expression. During his life, his works were often criticized and were somewhat controversial.
While Rodin showed artistic talent at a young age, he was a poor student. He attended the Ecolé Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématique where he learned modeling and drawing. He applied to get in to the noted Ecole des Beaux-Arts and was rejected three times. Humiliated by this failure, Rodin went to work for commercial decorators and sculptors. However, he had a compulsion to sculpt and opened his own studio.
Rodin spent six years in Belgium during which time he journeyed to Italy to visit the fourth Michelangelo centennial. Rodin began to depart from the accepted style of French sculpture, focusing on investigating the human form as a vehicle to express human emotion.
The Portland Art Museum recently presented a special exhibit: Rodin: The Human Experience—Selections from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collections. This exhibit displayed 52 bronzes by the groundbreaking French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The exhibition was staged to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the artist’s death.
According to the museum display:
“Between 1945 and the early 1960s, Bernie Cantor (1916-1996) and his wife Iris, created the world’s largest and most comprehensive private collection of works by Rodin. Concentrating on quality and significance, they collected nearly 750 sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and documents. The obsession was not only to own and understand the work, but also to share it.”
Rodin set up his studio to take full advantage of the demand for his work: bronze casting allowed him to produce large editions in a variety of sizes. According to the display:
“In his day and before, the master sculptor created his work first in clay or wax. When the master was satisfied with what he had created, craftsmen were assigned to create replicas of the master’s model, first in clay or in plaster, and from these, in stone (carvings) or in metal (usually bronze, thus castings). Although the master would supervise, he rarely participated in the creation of these stone or metal sculptures.”
Rodin had as many as 50 assistants in his studio.
According to the display:
“Among Rodin’s goals for The Gates of Hell was to combine sculpture and architecture so that neither would be of service to the other. A series of drawings and clay maquettes (sculpted sketches) made by Rodin in 1880 show how the artist came to his final design. This maquette is a pivotal piece in this transformation.”
According to the display:
“Ixelles Idyll, named to commemorate the location of its making, is composed of two chubby infants. The standing figure, a female, has wings, while the second figure is male. The female is directly related to another figure, Science, which Rodin made for the Palais de Académies in 1874.”