Rodin. Rainer Maria Rilke
Rodin
“Nothing can grow under big trees.”
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Biography
1840: Birth of Auguste Rodin in Paris on November 12th.
1850: Rodin starts to draw.
1854: He enters into a special school for drawing and mathematics, called “La Petite École”, and takes classes from Paul Émile Lecoq de Boisbaudran and the painter Jean-Hilaire Belloc.
1855: Rodin discovers sculpture.
1857: He leaves “La Petite École” and attempts to enter into the School of Fine Arts, but is rejected three times.
1862: Death of his sister Maria. Grief stricken by her death, Rodin goes to the Très-Saint-Sacrement, a Catholic Order, where he stays until 1863.
1864: Beginning of the collaboration with Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse.
1872: End of his collaboration with Carrier-Belleuse.
1873: He enters into a contract with Belgian sculptor Antoine-Joseph van Rasbourgh.
1875: Goes to Italy where he sees the works of Michelangelo.
1877: He exhibits The Age of Bronze in Brussels and then in Paris at the French artists’ Salon. Rodin is accused by critics of having cast a mould from a live model.
1880: The state buys The Age of Bronze and asks Rodin to design a door for the future Museum of Decorative Arts. He will work on the project for the rest of his life, although the museum was never built.
1881: He learns engraving with Alphonse Legros in London.
1883: He meets nineteen-year-old Camille Claudel.
1885: The Municipal Court of Calais commissions a commemorative monument to Eustache de Saint Pierre, which will become the Monument to the Burghers of Calais, inaugurated in Rodin’s presence in 1895.
1887: He is named a knight in the Legion of Honour.
1888: The state commissions The Kiss, in marble, for the Universal Exposition of 1889.
1889: He is a founding member of the National Society of Fine Arts.
1890: The project Monument to Victor Hugo (Victor Hugo seated) for the Pantheon is refused.
1891: A new model for the Monument to Victor Hugo (Victor Hugo standing) is designed and the Society of Men of Letters commissions a Monument to Balzac.
1898: Splits with Camille Claudel, then aged 34. The Society of Men of Letters refuses the Monument to Balzac in plaster.
1899: First expositions in Brussels, Rotterdam, Amsterdam and The Hague.
1902: Rodin meets the poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), who will be his secretary from September 1905 until May 1906.
1904: Rodin meets the Duchess of Choiseul with whom he splits with in 1912. First exhibition of The Thinker (plaster/large model) at the International Society of London and then at the Paris Salon (bronze). He has an affair with Gwendolen Mary John. She becomes his mistress and serves as his model for The Whistler Muse.
1905: Rodin is nominated a member of the Superior Council of Fine Arts.
1906: The Thinker is placed in front of the Pantheon. Rodin does a series of watercolours of Cambodian dancers and exhibits them at Marseille’s Colonial Exposition.
1907: First big exhibition devoted solely to his drawings is at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris.
1908: Moves to the Hôtel Biron (now the Musée Rodin) in Paris.
1910: Rodin is named as a commander of the Legion of Honour.
1913: Confinement of Camille Claudel. Exhibition at Paris Faculty of Medicine where the older works of Rodin’s collection are shown for the first time.
1914: Rodin flees during the war and leaves for England and then Rome.
1916: Rodin falls seriously ill. The State gives three successive donations to Rodin’s collections.
1917: Rodin marries Rose Beuret on January 29th, but she dies shortly afterwards on February 14th, not long before Rodin himself, who passed away on November 17th. The Thinker sits at the base of their tomb.
At the principal annual art exhibition, the Salon, in Paris in 1898, the sculptor Auguste Rodin exhibited two enormous statues – The Kiss and the Monument to Balzac. He was fifty-eight years old and nearing the height of his fame. It was both a challenging gesture and a brave response to professional and private adversity. Originally the embracing couple in The Kiss had been envisaged on a much smaller scale to take place on a massive pair of doors commissioned from the French government for a projected new museum of decorative art. Rodin had been working on the doors, known as The Gates of Hell, for almost twenty years; but by 1898 it had become clear that the museum would not be built. That year, Rodin enlarged the couple massively in marble for the Salon.
Jean-Baptiste Rodin, the Artist’s Father
c. 1864
Bronze, 41.5 × 28 × 24 cm
Musée Rodin, Paris
The Man with the Broken Nose
1864
Bronze, 26 × 18 × 23 cm
Musée Rodin, Paris
The Age of Bronze
1877
Bronze, 180 × 80 × 60 cm
Musée Rodin, Paris
The Balzac sculpture was another failed public monument, initially commissioned by a literary society in 1891 to commemorate the monumental nineteenth-century writer. After seven years of preparatory study, Rodin had decided to exhibit the work to reassure his critics that the project was nearing completion. When the committee responsible for the work saw it at the Salon, roughly cast in plaster, they rejected it and terminated their contract with him.
Call to Arms
1879
Bronze, 112 × 58 × 50 cm
Musée Rodin, Paris
The Thinker
1879–1880
Plaster
Musée Rodin, Paris
Certainly both works, so antithetical in style, discharge conspicuous erotic energies – a blatant indication that this element of the erotic, of sensual force and sexual primacy, was central to Rodin’s life and work. Of course the differences between the two works are immediately the more striking. If it still surprises us to know that both these works were made by the same man, the well-dressed Parisian crowds who saw them prominently on display at the Salon were equally nonplussed.
Saint John the Baptist
1880
Bronze
Musée Rodin, Paris