Auguste Rodin
French sculptor
1840 CE to 1917 CE
François-Auguste-René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917), known as Auguste Rodin, is a French sculptor.
Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he had not set out to rebel against the past.
Schooled traditionally, he takes a craftsmanlike approach to his work, and desires academic recognition, although he is never accepted into Paris's foremost school of art.
Sculpturally, Rodin possesses a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay.
Many of his most notable sculptures are roundly criticized during his lifetime.
They clash with the predominant figure sculpture tradition, in which works are decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic.
Rodin's most original work departs from traditional themes of mythology and allegory, models the human body with realism, and celebrates individual character and physicality.
Rodin is sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, but refuses to change his style.
Successive works bring increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.
From the unexpected realism of his first major figure — inspired by his 1875 trip to Italy — to the unconventional memorials whose commissions he later seeks, Rodin's reputation gros, such that he becomes the preeminent French sculptor of his time.
By 1900, he is a world-renowned artist.
Wealthy private clients seek Rodin's work after his World's Fair exhibit, and he keeps company with a variety of high-profile intellectuals and artists.
He marries his lifelong companion, Rose Beuret, in the last year of both their lives.
His sculptures suffer a decline in popularity after his death in 1917, but within a few decades, his legacy solidifies.
Rodin remains one of the few sculptors widely known outside the visual arts community.
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Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse had been a student of David d'Angers and briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts.
His career is distinguished by his versatility and his work outside France: in England between 1850 and 1855 (working for Mintons), and in Brussels around 1871.
His name is perhaps best known because Auguste Rodin had worked as his assistant between 1864 and 1870.
The two had traveled to Brussels in 1871, and by some accounts Rodin assisted Carrier-Belleuse's architectural sculpture for the Brussels Stock Exchange.
Dismissed by Carrier-Belleuse after assisting him on the “Caryatides” of the new Bourse, Rodin collaborates on the execution of decorative bronzes; his companion Rose Beuret has joined him in Brussels.
At the age of thity-five, Rodin has yet to develop a personally expressive style because of the pressures of the decorative work.
A journey to Italy in 1875 provides him with the shock that stimulates his genius.
He visits Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice before returning to Brussels, rescued from the academicism of his working experience by he inspiration of Michelangelo and Donatello.
Auguste Rodin, under the influences of last year's tour of Italy, molds his first original work, the bronze Le Vaincu (”The Vanquished”), the painful expression of a vanquished energy aspiring to rebirth.
Later retitled The Age of Bronze, the banal studio pose of a man leaning on a staff produced an unconventional and expressive gesture; Rodin's removal of the staff rendered the piece effective.
Rodin had learned from Honoré Daumier the bold modeling of surfaces that are emotive rather than literal; the statue is only a rough approximation that avoids the definitive finish of earlier sculpture and remains in a state of becoming.
It provokes scandals in the artistic circles of Brussels, as the realism of the work contrasts so greatly with the statues of Rodin's contemporaries that he is accused of having formed its mold upon a living person.
The highly naturalistic sculpture again inspires the scandalized outrage of the critics.
Camille Pissarro rents a room in Montmartre to show paintings to collectors, and begins to paint fans.
He meets the Florentine critic Diego Martelli.
Édouard Manet follows Nana and The Plum with The Blonde with Bare Breasts (1878, Musée d'Orsay, Paris), in which his subject's pearl-white flesh tones gleam with light.
He plans a private exhibition rather than submit to the jury of the World's Fair to be held that year, but it never materializes.
Manet's paintings do badly at auctions of the Faure and Hoschedé collections.
He becomes an uncle when Morisot gives birth to her daughter Julie Manet.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir paints Mme. Charpentier and Her Children (1878), exhibits The Cup of Chocolate at the Salon, and sells three paintings at low prices at the Hoschedé auction.
Auguste Rodin explores his personal style in St. Jean-Baptiste prôchant (St. John the Baptist Preaching, 1878; Museum of Modern Art, New York City).
He is rejected in various competitions for monuments to be erected in London and Paris, but finally he receives a commission to execute a statue for the Hôtel de Ville (City Hall) in Paris.
The fifth Impressionist exhibition, which includes eighteen participants, is held in Paris at No. 10 rue des Pyramides.
Edgar Degas exhibits eight paintings, pastels, drawings and etchings at the exhibition, in which he invites the controversial Jean-François Raffaëlli to participate.
Eadweard Muybridge’s serial action photographs of dancers and horses influence Degas’s ballet paintings.
Camille Pissarro exhibits eleven paintings and a series of etchings.
Berthe Morisot exhibits fifteen paintings and watercolors, and again spends the summer at Bougival and Beuzeval-Houlgate.
Mary Cassatt, who exhibits in the 1880 show, is at this time a figure painter whose subjects are groups of women drinking tea or on outings with friends.
Paul Gauguin, taking his starting point from Paul Cézanne's style of about 1880, passes from a capricious personal type of Impressionism to a greater use of symbols.
He exhibits with the Impressionists in 1880.
Édouard Manet's Execution of the Emperor Maximilian (1867-68, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Mannheim, Germany) is exhibited successfully in the U.S. and he has a one-man exhibition of new pastels at the premises of La Vie Moderne.
He also exhibits Portrait of Antonin Proust (1880, Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio, USA) and At Pére Lathuille's at the Salon.
He spends the summer at Bellevue in treatment for his illness, but his leg condition worsens and his health deteriorates.
From 1878, the Zola home in Médan, on the Seine River not far from Paris, has served as a gathering spot for a group of the novelist's disciples, the best known of whom are Guy de Maupassant and Joris-Karl Huysmans, and together they publish a collection of short stories, Les Soirées de Médan (1880; Evenings at Médan).
As the founder and most celebrated member of the naturalist movement, Zola publishes several treatises to explain his theories on art, including Le Roman expérimental (1880; The Experimental Novel).
He also returns to the theme of upper class sexual decadence in 1880's Nana.
Paul Cézanne divides his time between Melun, Paris, and Médan, visiting Zola.
He begins to systematize his technique into patterns of parallel brushstrokes that give a new significance to the pictorial surface.
In 1879-80, Cézanne paints an unassuming series of still lifes and self-portraits, and these, when they become known, profoundly impress the younger generation, who reckon them to be as monumental as the great art of the past, yet in a subtly different way that is inherent in the actual manner of painting.