785. Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), French,

Monument to Balzac, 1898. Bronze,

270 x 120 x 128 cm. Musée Rodin, Paris.

 

 

Auguste Rodin

(1840 Paris – 1917 Meudon)

 

French sculptor, Auguste Rodin took classes at the School of Decorative Arts, also called the ‘Little School.’ After failing the entrance exam three times, he was unable to attend the School of Fine Art. As if in revenge against the establishment, he became one of the greatest sculptors of the century. In 1864, Rodin became a student of Carrier-Belleuse, first a master, then friend, of whom he made a bust, almost twenty years later. In 1877, Rodin exhibited at the ‘Cercle de Bruxelles’ his plaster work, the Defeated, then at the Salon des Artistes Français under the title of Age of Bronze. The work provoked a real scandal, because the modelling appeared to be alive.

Accused of moulding from a cast, Rodin was finally cleared of all suspicion, notably as a result of the support of Carrier-Belleuse, and the affair finally allowed the genius of the sculptor to be revealed to the public. Now a recognised artist, he worked in a studio, in a marble works, on the rue de l’Université in Paris. In 1880, the state commissioned a cast of his Age of Bronze and a monumental door, for the future Museum of Decorative Arts. It is the beginning of public commissions which, until the death of the artist, never ceased and always ended, paradoxically, in scandal. Revolutionising sculpture by liberating the form, the work of Rodin was also marked by his admiration for Michelangelo whose non finito method he utilised in his own way, by letting his figures appear from blocks of marble in which they are kept prisoner.