Auguste Rodin: Sculptures and Drawings - Essay Example

Auguste Rodin Throughout his artistic career, Auguste Rodin worked to portray his art from a realist perspective. Rather than presenting the idealized body of the Neoclassicists, Rodin’s sculpture concentrated on capturing the actual figure, complete with all its inconsistencies and imperfections, as it appeared in the here and now physical realm. Although the bodies included in his works are imperfect and were often cast in materials that don’t necessarily capture the natural coloring and textures of the human models thus losing some of their realism, the figures are beautifully rendered, highly expressive and emotionally moving. They are so realistic that there were several accusations made that he was working with a cast made from a living model in an early piece entitled “The Age of Bronze” (Auguste Rodin, 2008). The problems that came from this encouraged him to make future sculptures of other than life-size scale as a means of proving this wasn’t the case. Because he was concerned about his artistic abilities being called into question and couldn’t work with a realistic life size, Rodin began using scale as a means of emphasizing the emotional appeal of the work, such as creating highly intimate scenes in smaller scale so as to force the viewer near. This had the effect of establishing a more intimate relationship between the viewer and the art. In his work, Rodin utilized realistic portrayals of subjects and dramatic use of scale to portray the underlying universal human emotion of his ideas formed throughout his career. Auguste Rodin is a well-known artist from the late 19th century who made a big break from the traditional schools of art that were then focused on a Neoclassicism modeled after the perfectionism of the ancients. Although he had definite ideas regarding the importance of realism in his own work, he was the only one who recognized its worth within his early years. Refused admission to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, the premiere school of arts in the region three times, Rodin never gave up on his ideals, choosing to support himself instead by completing decorative work for others (Biography, 2008). However, after the death of his sister, who had already devoted her life to a convent, Rodin felt it necessary to take her place in service of God. Fortunately, the Father Superior understood Rodin’s heart was already held elsewhere, within his art. By the time he was 24, he had moved in with the woman who wouldn’t become his wife until the last year of his life, Rose Beuret, and completed his first known work, “Man with a Broken Nose” (Biography, 2008). It wasn’t until after he’d traveled with Carrier-Belleuse, worked with A.J. van Rasbourg and studied the arts of Donatello and Michelangelo in Italy before he made what many consider to have been his break-through piece, now referred to as “Age of Bronze” (Biography, 2008). From here, his artwork became more and more characterized by his careful sense of motion within the figures. Through his focus on realistic portrayal and subsequent ability to convey a deep sense of emotion and motion within his work, Rodin was commissioned to create a doorway for the still-to-be-constructed Museum of Decorative Arts. Rodin was supposed to create the “Gates of Hell” from Dante’s inferno, and spent most of the rest of his life dedicated to the project, but it was never completed. “For Rodin, the study of the human figure in a variety of poses indicative of many emotional states was a lifelong preoccupation … The gestures of Rodin’s figures seem motivated by inner emotional states” (Varnedoe, 2008). By looking at one of his works, “Eternal Springtime,” one can see the way in which Rodin captures physical form and motion to illustrate inner tension and emotion. “His uncanny ability to convey movement and to show the inner feelings of the men and women he portrayed, the bravura of his light-catching modeling, and his extraordinary use of similar figures in different mediums, have established him as one of the greatest sculptors of all time” (Rodin Museum, 2008). According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Eternal Spring, 2009), “Eternal Springtime” (also referred to as Eternal Spring) was created in a variety of materials, primarily bronze and marble. The sculpture the New York museum has was executed in marble in 1906-1907, although the design is thought to have been modeled as early as 1881. “The sculpture was extremely popular, and Rodin repeated it often … In 1898, he sold his plaster foundry models with the reproduction rights for this sculpture and its spiritual twin, The Kiss, to the firm of Ferdinand Barbedienne” (Met Museum, 2009). The statue stands only 28 inches high, a little more than two feet, but it is extremely expressive as a result of Rodin’s approach to the science of modeling which he describes as seeing the form in terms of thickness rather than length. “Instead of imagining the different parts of a body as surfaces more or less flat, I represented them as projectures of interior volumes. I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the limbs the efflorescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep beneath the skin. And so the truth of my figures, instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself” (Rodin & Gsell, 1912: 59). The piece itself depicts a pair of lovers clinging to each other in a moment of passion. Originally designed for inclusion in the never-completed Gates of Hell, the purpose of the work is to illustrate the sins of passion but served as well to illustrate youthful passion as an expression of love and surrender. Both figures are depicted nude with the woman taking the lower position. She is seen posed on her knees at the base of a gnarled old tree or tree stump in such a way that it seems clear she would fall if not for the strong arm of the man supporting her. This is true even were she not bent backward for the kiss in a pose that thrusts her breasts into the focal area of the piece. The man also leans against the trunk of the tree in a very precarious position that is maintained by his other hand as he grasps a projection of the tree for support. He is bent over the figure of the woman as his chest muscles strain with the effort of holding them both while the position of his legs indicates his desire to be more fully entwined with her. One of the problems with the piece being so popular and recreated by cast and mold is that it lost much of Rodin’s original expressiveness and thus much of its ability to communicate. “There is a loss of definition in the modeling of the spatial intervals between the bodies and, and John Tancock pointed out, of spontaneity and élan overall” (Elsen et al, 2003: 496). In spite of this, there remains sufficient expression to inspire anger in some as Paul Claudel described the piece: the man “sits down to the woman as though to a meal. Seated, he can make the most of her. He sets to with both hands, and she does her very best, as the Americans say, to ‘deliver the goods’” (cited in Neret, 1994: 66). It is this element of the work that speaks so eloquently of the idea of lust and complete abandon to the senses. In his artwork, Rodin demonstrates an obsession with representing as much of the real as he can while still acknowledging and utilizing the properties of art in its attempts to represent a lived experience. He remains faithful to the imperfect forms of the human figure while also distorting these figures in some way as a means of more fully expressing the emotional appeals of their subjects. Rodin’s sculptures are often intended to be instructive in some sense, such as those developed for inclusion in the proposed master-work the Gates of Hell, yet they as easily stand as beautiful representations of living human flesh. This was the central concept of Rodin’s work as he constantly strove to capture the same kind of internal light that was expressed by the ancient Greeks when they carved the texture of the marble with such detail that the dimples of cellulite would be exposed in appropriate light. This, to him, was the ultimate expression of artistry and it is his ability to excel in this expression that gives his sculptures such endurance. While the figures challenge our inner sense of our own natures through their poses and juxtaposition, his work remains approachable because they retain that element of separation between living humans and artistic representation in their difference of scale. Works Cited “Auguste Rodin.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia Foundation, (June 20, 2008). December 15, 2009 . “Biography: Auguste Rodin.” Answers.com. (2008). December 15, 2009 Elsen, Albert Edward; Auguste Rodin; Rosalyn Frankel Jamison; Bernard Barryte et al. Rodin’s Art: The Rodin Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University. Oxford University Press, 2003. Neret, Gilles. Auguste Rodin: Sculptures and Drawings. Taschen, 1994. Rodin, Auguste & Paul Gsell. Art. Harvard University, 1912. Rodin Museum. Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2008. December 15, 2009 Varnedoe, Kirk. “Auguste Rodin.” A Fine Disregard. Cited in The Artchive. (2008). December 15, 2009 Read More