Who Was Auguste Rodin and Why Was His Sculpture So Revolutionary?

As part of his reimmersion, Rodin took classes with Antoine-Louis Barye (1795–1875), an animalier known as the “Michelangelo of the menagerie.” Barye was particularly fond of depicting big cats—lions, tigers, jaguars—with a focus on musculature that would greatly influence the younger artist. Rodin also started working for another sculptor, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse (1824–1887), a purveyor of commercial objets d’art and architectural embellishments.

Throughout, Rodin continued to make art, and in 1864 he created what he considered his first serious effort: Head of the Man with the Broken Nose. The sitter was a local handyman whose countenance included the eponymous feature. Rodin’s studio was unheated, and during a cold spell the clay froze, causing the back of the head to crack off, leaving just the face. In Rodin’s mind, this only enhanced the work, so he left it as it was, renaming it Mask of the Man with the Broken Nose. Thanks to Rodin’s warts-and-all approach, however, the piece was denied entry into the Salons of 1863 and 1864, though a reworked version was ultimately accepted for the Salon of 1875.

The 1870s proved to be a turning point in Rodin’s career. He briefly joined the army during the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), mustering out to find that the conflict had interrupted the redevelopment of Paris, leaving few avenues for employment. Encountering the same problem, Belleuse had already decamped for greener pastures in Brussels, and he invited Rodin to join him there. Rodin stayed in the Belgian capital for six years, realizing various projects alongside Belleuse until the two had a falling out over Rodin’s insistence on signing his work. Belleuse refused to allow it, whereupon Rodin struck out on his own as a full-time artist.

In 1876 Rodin traveled to Rome, Florence, and Naples, where he took in the accomplishments of Michelangelo and Donatello. That same year, he exhibited eight sculptures at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia as part of the Belgian pavilion. Though his work received no awards or critical mentions, Rodin would become hugely popular in America.

In 1877 Rodin took another run at the Salon with a plaster model for a standing male nude titled The Age of Bronze, originally shown in Brussels as The Vanquished. Its reception was the direct opposite of Mask’s and its rough appearance. Instead, it elicited accusations that it was too flawless to be anything but a life cast of a model. Rodin, of course, vigorously denied the charges, though the controversy raised his profile. To forestall such criticism going forward, his next piece, a portrayal of Saint John the Baptist, was larger than life, but it, too, prompted a backlash for rendering its subject without clothes.

Meanwhile, Belleuse had become art director of the Sèvres porcelain factory in France. In a gesture of goodwill, he offered his estranged aide part-time employment as a designer in 1879, which Rodin took up for the next three years, though he remained in Paris.

By then, Rodin’s career was beginning to take off. Along with the statue of Saint John, The Age of Bronze was accepted into the Salon of 1880, where it was purchased by the state and cast in bronze after receiving a medal—a triumph that attracted the attention of Edmund Turquet, the undersecretary of the Ministry of Fine Arts.

That same year, Turquet helped Rodin secure a commission for the entrance of a planned Decorative Arts Museum that was never built. Titled The Gates of Hell, the piece was as massive as it was theatrical, measuring nearly 20 by 14 feet with a depth of slightly over 3 feet. It depicted scenes from Dante’s Inferno and was based on the author’s description of the portal into the underworld with its infamous inscription, “Abandon every hope, who enter here.” Other inspirations included Lorenzo Ghiberti’s gilded bronze doors for the Baptistery of St. John in Florence (1425–1452), Michelangelo’s Last Judgment fresco from the Sistine ceiling (1536–1541), and Eugène Delacroix’s painting The Barque of Dante (1822).

Rodin’s ambition to match or even top these earlier masterpieces was certainly evident in the complex clash of figurative reliefs festooning The Gates—some 200 in all, including versions of what became The Kiss (1888–1889) and The Thinker (1904). He spent the next 37 years right up until his death working and reworking The Gates in a studio on the ground floor of the Hôtel Biron in Paris, which today houses the Rodin Museum.

Rodin was now a major figure in French art, but his personal life was about to gain equal notoriety when he met the French sculptor Camille Claudel (1864-1943) in 1882. In 1883 she entered Rodin’s studio as both his assistant and paramour.

Rodin was 42 and well known, while Claudel was 18 with no reputation to speak of, fostering a significant power imbalance between them. Furthermore, Rodin refused to leave his longtime companion, Marie Rose Beuret (1844–1917), a seamstress and laundress who’d been his lover since 1864.

Claudel worked with Rodin over the next decade, but as a woman artist in an entirely male-dominated field, she was financially dependent on him. Even so, her brilliance was recognized enough to win her a seat as a jurist for the National Society of Fine Arts in 1891, while works such as her Sakuntala (1888), Clotho (1893), and The Wave (1897) received wide approbation.

In 1892 Claudel ended the relationship but continued to receive Rodin’s monetary support until the bitter denouement of their involvement. The catalyst was Claudel’s The Mature Age (1900), a trio of nudes amid swirls of fabric that presented an old man being pulled away from a young woman by what’s apparently a female incarnation of death. Commissioned by the government, it enraged Rodin because he viewed it as a public airing of their breakup. He cut off Claudel and by some accounts pressured the Ministry of Fine Arts to cancel the sculpture’s completion in bronze, which it did.

Not unreasonably, Claudel thought Rodin was undermining her, a conviction that soon blossomed into full-blown paranoia. She began to destroy her sculptures and spent long periods of seclusion in her studio. In 1913, her brother had her committed to a mental asylum, where she remained until her death. Unfair as it was, Claudel’s treatment by Rodin and her family was not uncommon at the time. Still, she was celebrated by her contemporaries, and her importance to art history has only grown.

Rodin’s connection with Claudel coincided with the creation of some of his landmark works. Her role as his confidante and sounding board is reflected in an 1889 design for a monument honoring the writer Victor Hugo. Originally destined for the Panthéon in Paris, it shows the great man of letters seated and naked, save for a cloth wrapped around his waist. He’s seen in repose, resting his head on one hand. The figure of a muse (an echo of Claudel, perhaps) leans over Hugo, as if she were whispering the author’s next great idea into his ear. This suggestion that Hugo needed any kind of help caused a stir, and the piece wasn’t finalized in bronze until 1964.

More relevant to the future of art was Rodin’s epic The Burghers of Calais (1884–95), which set the stage for what was going to become a major shift in the spatial dynamics of sculpture. Commissioned for the plaza of the titular French port on the English Channel, the statue commemorates a moment during the English siege of Calais in 1346 when King Edward III offered to spare the city if six of its leaders surrendered to him for execution. They were ultimately spared, but not before they were forced to march out from the town with nooses around their necks.

In this work, Rodin depicts them as a life-size ensemble of figures with expressions registering everything from stoicism to despair. They look like they could blend in with people moving through the square, and that was exactly the point: Rodin wanted them placed directly on the ground, dispensing with the convention of raising statues on elevated bases. His wishes were never honored, however, though The Burghers currently resides on a relatively low plinth.

Still, Rodin’s desire to literally take sculpture down from its pedestal radically closed the distance between object and viewer, a notion that would impact 20th-century artists from Brancusi to Donald Judd and also set a precedent for installation art.

Notwithstanding his private entanglements, Rodin fostered an entirely new vocabulary for sculpture, making it more responsive to touch. Indeed, without his innovations, the medium’s 20th-century manifestations might have taken a very different shape.