Auguste Rodin's story resembles the archetypal struggle of the modern artist. He was born in obscurity; despite early promise he was rejected by the official academies; and he spent years laboring as an ornamental sculptor before success and scandal set him on the road to international fame. By the time of his death he was likened to Michelangelo. His high reputation as the father of modern sculpture remains unchanged, and in recent years the wider renown of his many drawings has also elevated his reputation as a draughtsman. However, his many intimate drawings of his models have also altered our impression of him, suggesting the exploitative sexual appetite that lay behind the image of the eminent and respected artist.

• Rodin stripped away many of the references to classical myth that was still attached to academic sculpture in the late 19th century, and placed a new stress on the dignity of simple humanity. The fame of works such as The Kiss, The Thinker, and The Age of Bronze has transformed them into paragons of high art, yet to Rodin's age their importance and novelty lay in avoiding that aura. Instead of representing gods or muses, he sculpted real, life-like figures in distinctive modern attitudes - of love, thought, and proud physicality.
• Rodin's achievement as a sculptor was to find a way to make the brute materiality of sculpture express the fleeting mobility of the modern individual. To achieve this he abandoned the polished and idealized figures of academic sculpture and produced rougher, more unfinished surfaces, which better expressed restlessness, corporeality, and movement. While this often suggests psychological agitation, it also evokes the constant movement that is characteristic of life in modern times.
• Rodin's work process often encouraged him to reuse compositions in different ways. Most famously, figures which appear in his greatest work, The Gates of Hell, were often later rendered separately, at different scales (and vice versa). But Rodin could also represent the same figure multiple times in the same sculpture; or fragment figures into individual body parts, like hands, or arms; or he would borrow a figure from one composition and use it in another. All of these processes were encouraged by his very unclassical approach to composition, and they produced strange and jarring effects which often prevented viewers from identifying with the figures.

Rodin was born in a poor area of Paris's 5th arrondissement to Jean-Baptiste Rodin, an office clerk in the local police station, and Marie Cheffer, his second wife. Despite Jean-Baptiste's modest earnings, he and Marie attempted to provide a bourgeois upbringing by sending Rodin to a boarding school in Beauvais. He was not a successful student, perhaps in part because of his short-sightedness. In 1854, aged 13, he decided to pursue a career in the arts, attending the Ecole Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques (or "Petite Ecole," to distinguish it from the Grande Ecole des Beaux-Arts), which trained boys in the decorative arts.

After three years of studying drawing and sculpture, Rodin applied to the Grand Ecole. While he passed the drawing competition, he failed three times in the sculpture competition. Most likely, his pursuit of naturalism did not suit the school's academic style. After the third rejection, Rodin resigned himself, at the age of 19, to taking jobs in plaster workshops to create architectural ornaments. Although he disliked working for others, these workshops provided him with a meager living for the next twenty years. In his own time, he continued to make sculptures, including a portrait bust called The Man with the Broken Nose (1863-64). He considered this the best of his work and submitted it to the Paris Salon in 1864, but it was rejected.

In 1866, Rodin met Rose Beuret, who remained his lifetime companion despite his numerous affairs; the same year, they had a son, Auguste-Eugéne Beuret, whom Rodin never recognized legally. Professionally, around this time, Rodin found better fortune filling commissions in the workshop of Carrier-Belleuse, a successful commercial sculptor, but the steady work and increased income was disrupted by the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Rodin served as an officer until the French surrendered in 1871, and then followed Carrier-Belleuse to Brussels.

In 1875, Rodin returned to Brussels after a trip to Florence to see the work of Michelangelo. He created a life-size sculpture of a young officer, which he called The Age of Bronze (1875-77), and this proved to be the turning point in his career. He submitted the finished work to the Salon in 1877, which accepted it, but with doubts about its authenticity (many accused him of casting directly from the model's body). Rodin's protests were not acknowledged by most critics, yet eventually the sculpture was purchased by Edmond Turquet, under-secretary of the Ministry of Fine Arts. Turquet also commissioned Rodin to create a monumental bronze doorway for a planned museum of the decorative arts. This project went on to be perhaps Rodin's greatest work, though the planned museum was cancelled, and The Gates of Hell, as the doors came to be titled, were not even cast until after the artist's death.

The years during which Rodin worked on The Gates of Hell coincided with his relationship with Camille Claudel. A young sculptor who joined his studio as an assistant in 1885, Claudel had a tumultuous affair with Rodin that lasted until 1892, though they continued to see each other until 1898. During their time together, Rodin made several erotic sculptures of loving couples, including The Kiss (c.1844) (also known as Paolo and Francesca). Claudel separated from Rodin when it became clear that he would not leave Rose to marry her.

Paris held a centennial celebration of the French Revolution in 1889, called the Exposition Universelle. For the occasion, Rodin showed 36 works together with Claude Monet at the Gallery of Georges Petit. Almost all of these were figures from, or influenced by, The Gates of Hell. Rodin's style changed after this major exhibit, becoming more spontaneous and loose. His drawings of the female form were simplified and abstracted, while sculptures were often left "unfinished," a smooth face or figure emerging from rough stone.

By 1899, Rodin had a large studio with several assistants. His work, however, continued to elicit trouble and scandal. The Burghers of Calais (1889) was nearly refused for its depiction of the city's heroes as dejected victims. In 1891, Rodin was commissioned by the Society of Men of Letters to create a memorial for the poet Honore Balzac. It was summarily rejected, however, when the committee saw the work at the Salon of 1898. For political reasons, Rodin retracted the commission, deciding to keep the sculpture in his possession.

Rodin's pace slowed down after the sculpture of Balzac, but he had achieved financial success. Several exhibitions around the turn of the century brought him worldwide renown. He exhibited in Belgium and Holland in 1899, and was given his first retrospective in Paris in 1900. Subsequent shows took place in Prague, New York and Germany. In 1908, Rodin moved to the now famous Hotel Biron, where he rented rooms along with other famous tenants such as Isadora Duncan, Rainer Maria Rilke and Henri Matisse. The Hotel became his new studio and the home of his affair with the Marquise (and later, Duchess) Claire de Choiseul. She exercised great control over his life and the sale of his work for seven years, until she was accused of stealing a box of drawings. Because of her scheming and that of other women around Rodin, friends encouraged him to marry Rose Beuret in January 1917. Rose died two weeks after the wedding, and Rodin passed away in November of that same year.

Before Rodin's death, he bequeathed all of his drawings, sculptures, and archives to the state of France to create a museum in Hotel Biron at Meudon. Yet even without a national museum, his sculptures and drawings would still have had a huge impact on younger artists. Henri Matisse was influenced by the spontaneity of his drawings, while Cubists and Futurists were fascinated by his sense of motion and the fragmentation of his human forms. While Rodin's reputation declined in the decades immediately following his death, his rebellion against academic standards, and his vivid expression of the human form, planted the seed for a new French sculpture. Today, nearly every large encyclopedic museum owns a casting of one of his sculptures, and exhibitions of his work are held regularly, making Rodin one of the few artists recognizable to the general public.


Below are Auguste Rodin's main influencers, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.



"To any artist, worthy of the name, all in nature is beautiful, because his eyes, fearlessly accepting all exterior truth, read there, as in an open book, all the inner truth."

"It is the artist who is truthful and it is photography which lies, for in reality time does not stop, and if the artist succeeds in producing the impression of a movement which takes several moments for accomplishment, his work is certainly much less conventional than the scientific image, where time is abruptly suspended."

"Every part of the human figure is expressive. And is not an artist always isolating, since in Nature nothing is isolated."

"In front of the model, I work with the same desire to copy the truth as if I were making a portrait; I do not correct nature, I incorporate myself into her; she leads me. I can work only from a model. The sight of the human form fortifies and nourishes me."