You can ask anyone to name a well-known artist and you’ll get a wide variety of answers. Leonardo, Picasso, Van Gogh and Rembrandt are all well known as are their most memorable works. Ask for the name of a sculptor however and the result is different. We see statues along with monuments just about anywhere we go, but can you name the sculptor? The subject is almost always more celebrated.
There are exceptions. Michelangelo is but one, Rodin is another. His statues are amongst the most celebrated in the world today and although they had been given a great deal of criticism in the course of his life, Rodin had been by far the most popular artist of his time. Almost everyone has heard the name.
Rodin took his work seriously and did not attempt to challenge the establishment or be deliberately different, but his life was brimming with intrigue and scandal and his art, particularly his nude statues, were during the time regarded as innovative, stunning, and also occasionally overly erotic.
Rodin’s aim was realistic depiction of the human form, a thing which set him at odds against the neoclassical tastes of that time period and he was plainly successful. His very first work, a nude sculpture named ‘the age of bronze’ resulted in a charge of surmoulage, utilizing a plaster cast from life in order to create his sculpture. He was eventually cleared, but due to this fact he generally worked in dimensions which were obviously never taken from a real person.
Quite possibly the most famous Rodin sculpture is known as ‘The Kiss’, a nude statue exhibiting a pair of lovers interrupted just as their lips are on the verge of meeting. The Kiss Rodin started out within the ‘The Gates of Hell’ a design Rodin worked on for several years which was meant to form the entrance of a new museum. Several of his most celebrated statues started out in that way yet he eliminated ‘The Kiss’ because it did not seem to match with the overall motif. A relief variation of Rodin’s ‘Young Mother With Child’ may be seen within the lower left side of the Gates of Hell. It seems very likely the mother is modelled on his mistress, Rose Beuret and the child on their son.
Other Rodin statues were imagined from a rather different source of creativity. At the age of forty three Rodin met Camille Claudel who was then 18. They then had an intense affair, but Rodin continually refused to make a complete split with Rose and after nearly 12 years Camille concluded their romantic relationship. Three years after Rodin went back to Rose.
Camille was herself a sculptor and in the opinion of many art historians a master in her own right. She helped Rodin with many of his works and was also the inspiration for many of his most popular nude statues, including ‘Eternal Idol‘. She can also be viewed as the model for ‘The Bather’, another nude statue by Rodin that started out as a faun in ‘The Gates of Hell’. Camille had been successful as a sculptress but a couple of years after her breakup with Rodin she appeared to have a nervous breakdown, demolished many of her statues and falsely accused Rodin of taking her work and aiming to kill her. Although she recovered, in 1913 her family members had her committed to an institution where she stayed for 30 years. The staff wrote regularly, counseling her friends and family that Camille was not mentally ill , but her mother would not consent and so Camille stayed in the mental hospital until she passed away in 1943. Rodin finally married Rose in 1917, the year they both died.
Rodin made his statues by producing them at a considerably scaled-down dimension in a medium which was not hard to manipulate. He had assistants duplicate the smaller statue in marble and then produced the final touches himself. One result of this is that there’s no definitive version of many Rodin statues. You will find three large (about 6 feet) marble versions of ‘The Kiss’: The first had been commissioned by the French government and is today in the Musée Rodin in Paris, the next was commissioned by an unconventional Englishman and can now be found in the Tate Modern in London and the third and final, created in 1903 can be found in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek.
Rodin created art for over half a century and in that period made many hundreds of statues, busts, oil paintings and watercolors including his famous the Thinker Statue. He passed away in 1917.
In a bizarre twist, works by Camille Claudel often sell for far more than similar works by Rodin, however her identity is nearly unknown. Her face and figure, immortalized by her renowned lover, will be remembered.
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