Discords and triumphs of Auguste Rodin

In spite of his success, Rodin was often in conflict with the Institute of France, the national art academy, with the public, and even with the Parliament. He devoted a decade to executing four monuments honoring the landscape painter Claude Lorrain, President Domingo Sarmiento of Argentina, and the writers Victor Hugo and Honoré de Balzac, and each of the four monuments was challenged. In Nancy, France, the Claude statue and, in Buenos Aires, the President Sarmiento caused riots. The conflicts over the Victor Hugo and the Balzac were even more serious.

In 1886 he received the order for the monument to Hugo for the Panthéon, France’s hall of its great men. The nudity depicted in the work caused such shock that he had to abandon the project. It was 1909 before another Victor Hugo, also nude but seated, was installed at the gallery of the Palais-Royal, although it had been intended for the Luxembourg Gardens. In 1891, Rodin was commissioned to portray Balzac for the Society of Men of Letters. He gave himself over completely to massive research designed to translate the several Balzac portraits into sculpture. He obtained the exact measurements of the novelist’s body by finding his former tailor. After much conjecture and experimentation to find an appropriate posture for the statue, he finally conceived of the writer as partly draped. The concisely designed model resembled a menhir, or upright prehistoric altar stone, foreshadowing the simplicity of modern art. The artist’s delays and his design for the statue brought on a legal dispute with the society, and, when the model was shown at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1898, it generated a violent debate in which the sculptor was defended by Georges Clemenceau, the future premier of France. Finally Rodin reimbursed the society and took back the model. The statue, cast in bronze, was not erected until 1939, in the crossroads of the Montmartre section of Paris.

The Exposition Universelle of 1900 in Paris featured a pavilion in which 150 of Rodin’s sculptures and numerous drawings were displayed, testifying to the international scope of his fame. After it closed, he had his works transported to a property that he had bought at Meudon in 1896. His residence there became a vast workshop where he employed a legion of assistants amid an endless stream of “favorites” who passed as his students. He was by then less a sculptor than an entrepreneur of sculpture. He himself executed only models, of which he made many, while searching for the form that suited him. Casting in bronze was the domain of specialists, but he also delegated the hewing of marble to others, to be executed under his direction but not by him. He was assisted in this “industrial” enterprise by a series of secretaries, including for a brief period the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke.

After 1900 Rodin’s worldwide success attracted abundant orders for portrait busts from the United States, Germany, Austria, England, and France. He enjoyed great renown in England, where he had numerous friends and which he often visited. In 1902 he was carried in triumph by students at a banquet in his honor in London. In 1907 he went to London for the inauguration of his monument to the poet William Henley at Westminster Abbey, and he—along with the French composer Camille Saint-Saëns and the U.S. writer Mark Twain—was made a doctor honoris causa at Oxford University. In May 1908, King Edward VII of England visited him at his workshop in Meudon.

In the same month, Rodin also rented a floor in one of the most beautiful 18th-century Parisian mansions, the Hôtel Biron, which was surrounded by an immense garden. Eventually, he occupied the entire premises under an agreement by which the French state agreed to acquire and preserve the mansion as the Rodin Museum in return for his donation to the state of all his works. These negotiations were endangered, however, by the self-serving intrigues of the last of his great favorites, an American who became duchess of Choiseul. They were furthered by Judith Cladel, who became his chronicler and who worked to see that the negotiations were successful, and by his last secretary, Marcelle Tirel, who defended him from the covetousness of women who tried to coax away his legacy. The purchase of the mansion and the donation of Rodin’s goods was finally completed in 1916. The museum is constituted as an autonomous organization maintained by sales of castings from plaster casts that he left. On the day of Rodin’s burial a solemn service was celebrated in his honor at Westminster Abbey in London.

To his sculpture, Rodin added, during his lifetime, book illustrations, dry-point etchings, and innumerable drawings of nudes, principally female. He also had literary pretensions and produced several writings with the help of friends. He was enamored of the art of the Middle Ages, and among his major efforts was the book Les Cathédrales de France (1914; Cathedrals of France, 1965).

Legacy

At the beginning of the 20th century Rodin was famous throughout the world and long had been revered as a modern-day Michelangelo, a titan of sculpture, an incarnation of the power of inspired genius. Even his prodigious sensuality was excused as a symbol of his Olympian stature. Three-quarters of a century later, however, criticism had become less uniform, pointing to the elements in his work that belie his early life as a decorative sculptor and the concomitant lack of formal discipline. Nonetheless, he exerted an immense influence on sculpture, and his numerous students from many countries helped to spread his style. His example was particularly fruitful for later French sculptors such as Charles Despiau, Aristide Maillol, and Antoine Bourdelle.

Most major museums own copies of his works, and museums in Paris, Philadelphia, and Tokyo are dedicated to him. Rodin’s prime contribution was in bringing Western sculpture back to what always had been its essential strength, a knowledge and sumptuous rendering of the human body. His evocations of great men, such as his George Bernard Shaw and Nijinsky, are uniformly brilliant.