Back to Top

 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Top

 
Fantasy Art History
Fantasy Art Work | Van Gogh | Hieronymus Bosch | Paul Gauguin | Paul Cezanne | Auguste Rodin

Portrait of Auguste Rodin
        Auguste Rodin ,November 12, 1840- November 17,1917, was a French Sculptor. Rodin revitalized and redefined sculpture during the same years that Manet and Monet did the same for painting within the Impressionist movement. Rodin was bold and creative sculpting the figure with a genius not seen in sculpture since Bernini. The surface of his sculpture writhed with energy and motion as it defined muscles and tension of the figure. With his clay he worked his surfaces with wrinkles and exaggerated masses to express the human form full of life. He sometimes left parts of the figure unfinished, as if it was a study for a sculpture. This was unheard of before his time and he was the first to make of unfinishness an aesthetic principle that governed both his handling of surfaces and the whole shape of the work.
       As a young artist in Paris, Rodin collaborated with other artists on public commissions, mostly memorials and architectural sculptures with other artists to support himself. In 1879 he was awarded a major

commission, to make a gated entrance for the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris. He began work on his famous work, The Gates of Hell, which was so ambitious and so elaborate that it was never completely finished. The inspiration for the Gates of Hell came from Dante's Inferno and and his writhing figures relate to the imaginative and fantastical work of William Blake.
      Rodin's art was inspired by nature and deemed 'Romantic Art' versus academic art at the time in Paris. Academic art had made sculpture stiff and stale, with pre-approved figure poses, and models with perfect proportions and sterytypical characteristics of Greek beauty. Rodin, in contrast, hired peasants, dancers, and acrobats for his models and invited them to move freely in his large studio, to surprise him with their unstudied gestures. He intended to capture and celebrate nature.The Neo-Classicism of the eighteenth Century replete with sculpture Heroes, goddesses, nymphs from ancient mythology, biblical prophets and allegory, was giving way to a fresh look at nature, inspired by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rouseau. Rousseau wrote, 'For us, existence is feeling: and our capacity to feel inarguably precedes our reason.' Rodin's sculpture evoked the emotion of the figure as much as descibing the human anatomy.
      Rodin did not finished the Gates of Hell but they served as a matrix for countless smaller pieces of artwork that were made into independent works. For example, one of his best known sculptures, The Thinker, was conceived as man at the top of the Gates of Hell, a poignant figure contemplating life and death. He made a small study of the thinker for the Gates and later made a life size version that sits in the Metropolital Museum of Art in New York today.
 


 
 
 
   

Please note that in preparing this site we have tried hard to respect copyrighted material, and comply with fair use guidelines. If you feel we have violated your copyright or other rights, please notify us and we will remove the offending material. This site is a non-commercial educational resource, and our primary intent is to provide a recourse for the advancement of the study of art and art history.

We hope you have enjoyed this site. Please email questions or comments to
marta@ fantasyarts.net.
©2007 Fantasy Arts