Auguste Rodin

François-Auguste-René Rodin (Paris, 1840 – Meudon, 1917), known as Auguste Rodin, was a French sculptor now regarded as one of the founders of modern sculpture. His importance lies in breaking with the academic canon that dominated nineteenth-century French sculpture. This did not mean he ignored the rules of his time, which he knew well; rather, his view of art opened a new chapter. Today he is seen as a precursor of many twentieth-century sculptural directions more than as a typical artist of the 1800s, and he is one of the few sculptors widely known beyond the visual arts.

Rodin was born into a modest family in Paris, the son of a clerk at the Police Prefecture, and his education was irregular. At fourteen he entered the Petite École, a school of art and mathematics, where he learned to draw and model from memory under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran. This teacher believed in first developing each student's personality so that they would observe with their own eyes. Rodin applied three times to the École des Beaux-Arts without success. For nearly two decades he earned his living as a craftsman and ornamenter, producing decorative objects and architectural embellishments.

In 1862, after the death of his sister Marie, he went through a personal crisis and briefly joined the Congregation of the Blessed Sacrament. Around 1864 he began his relationship with Rose Beuret, his companion for life, and joined the studio of Carrier-Belleuse, for whom he worked as chief assistant until 1870. After the war he spent several years in Brussels. He travelled to Italy in 1875, where he studied the work of Donatello and Michelangelo, and on his return he began The Age of Bronze, a life-size figure whose realism led to accusations that he had cast it from a living model. The controversy brought him fame, and in 1880 the state bought the statue.

That same year he received a commission for a portal for a museum of decorative arts, inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy. The Gates of Hell occupied him for much of the following four decades, and the museum it was meant for was never built. From it came works such as The Thinker and The Kiss, first shown together in 1886 at the Galerie Georges Petit. His work was criticised for looking unfinished or fragmented and for moving away from traditional themes of mythology and allegory. Rodin did not change his style, and his continued output brought growing favour from the government and the artistic community.

His style is marked by the expressive physicality of his figures and by surfaces that seem to vibrate in the light, with a bodily tension that broke with academic idealisation. Among his students and associates were Camille Claudel, Antoine Bourdelle and Constantin Brâncuși, who later developed their own languages. By 1900 he was an internationally recognised artist. He died in Meudon in 1917, and his reputation dipped briefly after his death, but within a few decades his legacy was secured and he remains an essential reference for understanding modern sculpture.