René François Auguste Rodin, known simply as Auguste Rodin (November 12, 1840 - November 17, 1917), was a French sculptor, and is still one of the most famous and renowned in the world.
After graduating from an art school in his teens, Rodin spent years struggling to find popular success while dealing with poverty and the climate of the Franco-Prussian War. He didn't find great success with The Age of Bronze, which set the template for most of his works. He focused on naturalistic depictions of human individuals, less on the allegorical or moral significance of his work, and he gained fame for this. So with that we got works such as The Walking Man, St. John the Baptist Preaching, Monument to Balzac, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell and the many works derived from it (The Thinker, Fugitive Love, The Kiss, Ugolino and his Children, The Three Shades).
He had about 50 students. The most famous of them was the very talented Camille Claudel, who became his muse and mistress and died in poverty and dementia in 1943. They had at least two children together, though Rodin never recognized any. Some debates still rage about who sculpted a few statues from Rodin's workshop, Rodin himself or Claudel.
Oh, and he also did some portraits and writing. They weren't as good as his sculptures, which were so lifelike there was a controversy where it was thought he was putting molds on people to make them.
Rodin married his main concubine Rose Beuret in January 1917 when she was dying from pneumonia, she passed two weeks later at age 73. He followed her in the grave in November of the same year.
Media about Rodin:
- He was among the late 19th century artists to be filmed by playwright and filmmaker Sacha Guitry (a friend of his) in the 1910s. Guitry included the footage (see here
) in his documentary film Ceux de chez nous with commentary in his [Guitry's] cabinet. According to Guitry, in the 1910s there were many Rodin museums abroad during his life, while in France he still wasn't taken very seriously. - The character of Claude Zoret from the 1924 film Michael has often been interpreted as a fictionalized Rodin (or perhaps Claude Monet).
- Gérard Depardieu portrayed him in the 1988 biopic film Camille Claudel alongside Isabelle Adjani as Claudel.
The body of work of Auguste Rodin provide examples of the following:
- Ancient Tomb: The foundations of The Gates of Hell are two old tombs, representing that Hell is a land of death, the dead, and the ever-dying.
- Cats Are Magic: The Succubus of course takes on the posture of a cat, playing on the ancient association cats have with witches and demons.
- Contrapposto Pose: The Age of Bronze features a young man stretching with most of his weight on his left foot, with his right foot lifted slightly above the ground. His face is also half-turned to the right and he's raising his right arm that way to, so the whole thing creates the illusion of a man turning to look to his right.
- Death of a Child:
- More than a few dead infants and children are shown damned in The Gates of Hell. This is in keeping with the source material, where the protagonist struggles with the morality of damning unbaptized children.
- Ugolino and his Children are all dead from starvation or about to be.
- Dissonant Serenity: In the chaotic context of The Gates of Hell, The Thinker's calm look of deep thought seems very out-of-place. He is surrounded by a crowd of writhing sinners seemingly caught in mid-motion as skeletal figures push them around.
- Eyes Always Averted: All The Burghers of Calais can't bear to look each other in the eye as the six of them go to their death.
- Face Death with Dignity: Two of the The Burghers of Calais are standing tall with heads held high as they are lead to their death in chains.
- Fauns and Satyrs: Rodin has more than a few sculptures based on stories of fauns from Greek mythology. More often then not, they appear to be beautiful young people with goat legs rather than rowdy, dirty Horned Humanoids.
- Garden Garment: As is typical of the time, the nude figure of St. John the Baptist Preaching is given a fig leaf to cover his manhood.
- Heaven Above: You can tell St. John the Baptist (is) Preaching without knowing the tile because he is pointing up at the sky, indicating that there is the topic of his conversation. That would be enough for Rodin's audience to deduce the figure is talking about Heaven and He who resides there.
- Hell: The Gates of Hell do their best to capture Dante's Inferno in stone. Almost all of the figures are in poses emphasizing their terrible agony, whether they're crying in the arms of their damned lovers, fleeing from skeletons, or being crushed under the gates themselves.
- Heroic Sacrifice: The subjects of The Burghers of Calais are all going to their deaths to save others. Notably, most of the burghers are terrified, mourning, or just in despair, rather than appearing glorified and honorable.
- Our Sirens Are Different: The Sirens depicts the sirens as women crouched in unnatural positions with empty eyes and wild hair that tangles with that of other sirens.
- Public Domain Character: Rodin sculpted quite a few historical figures, such as the six volunteers to be executed at Calais or St. John the Baptist.
- Primal Stance: Ugolino and His Sons gets across that the subject is a vile man starved unto cannibalism by showing him walking over his children's corpses on all fours. He looks just like a wild animal with its mouth agape in hunger.
- Security Cling: The couple in Fugitive Love are in clear distress as they strangely embrace for comfort. It also seems like they're being torn apart. Given they were included on The Gates of Hell as an adaptation of a couple eternally blown apart by a whirlwind, odds that's what Rodin was going for.
- Succubi and Incubi: The Succubus depicts a naked, demonic woman ready to tempt men to sin with her beauty.
- Take Me Instead: The backstory of The Burghers of Calais is that the six men portrayed offered their own lives as ransom to spare their whole city from the king's wrath.
- Thinker Pose:
- The Gates of Hell is of course the Trope Maker, but the standard view from the side is not the original intended perspective: the Thinker was meant to be at the top of a 20-foot structure gazing down on the viewer as if in judgment, not gazing off at nothing in particular while lost on thought.
- Later in his life, Rodin did make copies of The Thinker alone without the rest of the infernal gates, letting the viewer imagine the thinker alone in his thoughts as his rest on his own hand.
