The last thing you’d call Auguste Rodin was “intellectual.” Genius, yes. Man of reason, no. So it’s ironic that his most famous work, The Thinker, has been adopted as the universal symbol for philosophy and intellectualism. Rodin preferred a life of action to one of contemplation, and he intended the work to represent an artist like himself. With The Thinker, he depicts the monumental effort of artistic creation, the effort to which he devoted his life.
Rodin’s creative impulses surfaced early. Born to a working-class family in Paris and christened François-Auguste-René Rodin, he doodled his way through school, ending up a spectacularly bad student. When he dropped out at age fourteen, he had difficulty reading and could barely count, but he shrugged off his lack of education and declared, “Spelling mistakes are no worse than the drawing mistakes that everyone else makes.”
Reluctantly supporting his son’s talent, Rodin’s father allowed him to enroll in 1854 in the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et Mathématiques, a state-sponsored institution that trained decorative artists in design. After two years of study, Rodin decided to seek entrance at the more prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, but he failed the entrance exam—three times. (Oof.) He was disappointed at the time but over the years adopted a “you-can’t-fire-me-because-I-quit” attitude. In any case, his father soon tired of footing the bill for this artistic nonsense and insisted his son get a real job. Rodin started working as an artist’s assistant in various studios and factories. After ten years employed by others, he finally held his first exhibition in Brussels in 1871.
In 1875 Rodin splurged on a trip to Italy to see the masterpieces of the Renaissance. Fired up after studying Michelangelo, he attempted his first full-size nude—and walked straight into his first scandal. Titled The Age of Bronze, the sculpture of magnificently muscled male stands in a pose reminiscent of Michelangelo’s 1516 Dying Slave. In a period when sculpture aspired to neoclassical ideals of form over realistic depictions of the human body, the figure was shockingly lifelike—so lifelike that critics accused Rodin of casting from a live model rather than shaping the nude by hand. Rodin was devastated. It took a government inquiry to put the controversy to rest.
The kerfuffle nevertheless brought Rodin to the attention of the French Ministry of Fine Arts. First they purchased The Age of Bronze in 1880. Then they presented him with a major commission, the design of a monumental doorway for a proposed museum of the decorative arts. Rodin turned for inspiration to Dante’s Divine Comedy, the fourteenth-century epic poem that describes the poet’s imagined journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven. He focused on the Inferno portion of the tale, which details the eternal sufferings of the damned. He called his work The Gates of Hell.
Rodin began the project with enthusiasm, sketching plans and modeling figures. He decided on the size of the work (15 feet tall by 12 feet wide) and the general approach (straining nudes emerging from the surface of the doors) before executing his designs. And then … bupkis.
Rodin simply couldn’t bear to finish, and The Gates of Hell was never assembled during his lifetime. Over the years, the ministry routinely asked what had happened to their doorway, only giving up when plans for the decorative arts museum were shelved. Rodin’s response? “What about cathedrals—are they ever finished?”
The doorway was far from an artistic dead end. Au contraire. It provided Rodin with a wellspring of inspiration for works including The Thinker, which began as a depiction of Dante. He initially envisioned the poet as a cloaked, standing figure, but his instinct was always for the conceptual over the allegorical. Instead of sculpting an historic individual, Rodin decided to design a nonspecific artist in the process of creation. He positioned the figure, then titled The Poet, jutting out from the top of the doorframe, not only pondering the suffering of souls in hell but also imagining the entire work into being. In Rodin’s words, “He is no dreamer. He’s a creator.”
Rodin then decided to separate the work from the doors and exhibit it on its own. The figure became even less allegorical, with Rodin renaming it The Thinker. Lacking context, the sculpture becomes anonymous and, in the original meaning of the word, abstract.
Several other figures from The Gates of Hell also took on independent lives. The Kiss began as a depiction of Paolo and Francesca, the two famous lovers from canto V of the Inferno. The Three Shades originally stood atop the doorway as Rodin’s interpretation of Dante’s inscription on the entrance to hell, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.”
While continuing to tinker with The Gates of Hell, Rodin eventually moved on to new projects and new controversies. A series of commissions for public monuments exposed his work to a wider audience but also provoked criticism. His monument to French author Honoré de Balzac prompted a storm of outrage, with critics labeling it an obese monster, a shapeless lump, and a giant fetus. Nevertheless, Rodin’s popularity grew until, by the turn of the century, he had become a society darling. Women found him irresistible and treated him like a natural wonder, an artistic genius who was all Romantic impulse and tousled hair. Rodin didn’t mind, particularly when they paid handsome commissions for sculpted portrait busts.
In his noncommissioned work, Rodin created increasingly fragmentary figures. He sculpted dozens of versions of disembodied arms, legs, and heads, drawing inspiration from the remains of Greek and broken Roman sculptures. Armless Meditation (1894) lacks, well, arms. The Walking Man (1907) has neither arms nor head, and Arched Torso of a Woman (1910) lacks all extremities. He liked his work to remain partially unfinished, leaving in place the rough seams from casting plaster and the impressions of fingerprints. By 1911, the French viewed him as national treasure. The government purchased his Paris home, the Hôtel Biron, to develop it as a museum; in exchange, Rodin donated all his work to the state. The outbreak of World War I forced him to withdraw to his country house in Meudon, southwest of Paris, to endure coal shortages, food rationing, and the threat of German troops. He continued to work steadily until weakened by a stroke in July 1916. Rodin died in Meudon, surrounded by his supporters, in November 1917.
Rodin’s work remained popular after his death, although what interested later generations was not his skill in modeling the human body but his fascination with the fragmentary and nonallegorical. Twentieth-century sculpture quickly became so abstract that it abandoned the human form altogether. Rodin would have been amazed at his legacy.
Rodin met Rose Beuret, an uneducated seamstress, in 1864. While serving as his model, she became pregnant; their son was born in 1866, although Rodin never legally acknowledged paternity. For the rest of their lives, Beuret remained slavishly attached to the artist: She cleaned his house, cooked his food, and slept in his bed.
Beuret’s devotion didn’t stop Rodin from pursuing other women, particularly Camille Claudel. When the two met in 1882, Rodin was an established artist, and Claudel was a young, aspiring student. He found her skill, intelligence, and fierce ambition powerfully attractive. Soon they were working side by side and living as lovers in a country love nest. When apart, they wrote each other racy letters. A typical Rodin note reads, “Have mercy upon me, naughty girl. I can’t take it any longer.” A typical Claudel response: “I go to bed naked to make me think you’re here.”
But the passion couldn’t last. Claudel worried that Rodin would get credit for her achievements. Then she got pregnant and, determined to persevere as an artist, had an abortion. Rodin felt betrayed. He refused to give up the good life with Beuret, enraging Claudel. Most seriously, Claudel’s mental health began to fail. She broke with Rodin in 1898 and soon fell victim to schizophrenia. In 1913, Claudel’s family had her committed to a mental asylum, where she died in 1943.
The faithful Beuret, meanwhile, stood by her man. Most found her a baffling figure, seemingly unable to comprehend Rodin’s wealth and fame and apparently content to be treated as a servant. As the two neared death, their friends decided their relationship should be formalized and convinced Rodin at long last to marry her. They wed on January 29, 1917, in the midst of a freezing war-time winter. Beuret had little opportunity to enjoy her new marital status. Bed-ridden at their wedding, she died two weeks later.
AFTER MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AND NUMEROUS INFIDELITIES, AUGUSTE RODIN FINALLY AGREED TO MARRY HIS LONG-TIME MISTRESS, ROSE BEURET. BED-RIDDEN AT THEIR WEDDING, BEURET DIED TWO WEEKS LATER.
Rodin was one of five children, three of whom died in early childhood. His relationship with his surviving sibling, older sister Maria, was understandably close. After an unhappy love affair as a young adult, Maria decided to devote her life to the church and entered a convent as a novice. Shortly before taking her vows, she succumbed to smallpox, dying on December 8, 1862.
Devastated, Rodin decided to take up his sister’s calling. He entered the Order of the Holy Sacrament and took the name Brother Augustin. The prior of the community quickly realized the young man lacked the vocation for a life of abstinence and self-denial. He encouraged Rodin to sketch and model, gradually drawing the artist out of his grief. A grateful Rodin soon returned to his studio. We are left to wonder what havoc this passionate man would have wreaked on a monastery.
Contemporary artists have drawn much inspiration from The Thinker. Keith Tyson’s 2001 The Thinker (After Rodin) is a twelve-foot-tall black hexagon housing a bank of computers that runs an artificial intelligence program; set to operate for 33,000 years, the only output is an LED display counting the seconds up to 76.5 years, the average human lifespan. The artist says he likes the idea that you know the machine is thinking but not what it is thinking about.
Several contemporary versions have a scatological vein. Miguel Calderón created his Thinker in 1971 out of stacks of toilet-paper rolls. Cody Choi’s 1996–97 exhibition The Thinker consisted of seven life-size sculptures formed from 2,500 rolls of toilet paper soaked in 20,000 bottles’ worth of Pepto-Bismol. That’s a lot of Pepto.
Rodin worked at his own pace and resented anyone who expected him to create on a schedule. The Monument to Balzac, for example, took years longer than anyone anticipated. Commissioned in 1891 by the Société de Gens de Lettres, it was supposed to be completed in May 1893. In October 1894, the society got so fed up that they demanded that the work be delivered in twenty-four hours. Rodin replied, “Don’t they understand that great art does not keep delivery dates?” He didn’t display Balzac until 1898.
It didn’t take long for The Thinker to be adopted as a satirical symbol. As early as 1907, a French cartoonist created a caricature for a magazine cover that showed Rodin in the form of his own sculpture. Cartoonists for the New Yorker have also been fans, returning repeatedly to the figure. In a 1998 cartoon, a man is shown hunched over in The Thinker’s iconic pose at the edge of the bed; his naked partner sits up beside him, saying, “Believe me, you’re just thinking about it too much.”
