Born to a working class Parisian family, Auguste Rodin began to draw at the age of 10 and became enamored with sculpture five years later. Attempting to enroll at the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-arts he was denied entrance after failing a sculpture test on three occasions. He served just a quick stint in the army because his extreme near-sightedness made him unfit for duty. Undecided as to career, he briefly joined a Catholic order where a priest encouraged him to return to artwork.
Through September 18 at Williamstown’s Clark Art Institute you can view the masterful works of sculptor Auguste Rodin, from studies in original plaster casts to a massive bronze of his most well known statue “The Thinker.”
The exhibit’s curator Antoinette Le Normand-Romain provided a tour through the works during a recent press reception.
She explained that the exhibit was first scheduled for last year, however, due to that dark time of quarantine, the show was postponed. Contributing factors included difficulties in securing museum works as many venues were closed.
“For a time we did not get answers (since) there were staff shortages,” she said. “To lend sculptures is a lot of work, to be sure that they’re in good shape and to install them and there are conservation concerns.”
Le Normand-Romain had previously served as curator of the Paris Musee Rodin as well as at the Musee d’Orsay. More recently she was director of the Paris Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art. Le Normand-Romain contributed to and edited the exhibit catalogue “Rodin in the United States” (CAI; 260pg. $50).
She explained that making choices for the show wasn’t difficult.
“In the case of Rodin, we have preserved everything because he willed his estate to the French government in 1916,” she said. “So, we have all the steps of his work.”
The galleries have all the weight of his work as well. The Museum of Baltimore has a strict policy of refusing to loan “The Thinker” from their collection. Le Normand-Romain, however, persisted.
A bronze, “The Thinker,” originally titled “The Poet,” weighs in at 1,700 pounds requiring a crane for installation. Its creation inspired the French, as the clothing-optional statue suggested patriotism; the muscular man who was also an intellectual.
As an artist who transformed the field of sculpture by taking wild, experimental risks, Rodin may have at one time actually used a hammer and chisel. His obsession, however, was with the quality of clay and he seemed to enter a trance-like state while manipulating the substance. There are photographs of him, in suit and tie, wreathed in wet clay.
The German writer Stefan Zweig said that Rodin, while working with clay, would be “making unintelligible sounds … His eyes … now flashed with strange lights and he seemed to have grown larger and younger.”
Once an image was formed, his studio apprentices would cast it in plaster. To copy this model for a final creation in stone, a point device, an armature with needle-like projections, was used. The “macchinetta di punto” would take hundreds of three-dimensional depth readings for the carvers to follow. On many of the plaster models you will see the pinpoint marks.
Rodin studied in Italy and was greatly influenced by the classical style of Michelangelo. In his early years he followed that mode and in 1877 he created the life-size male nude “The Age of Bronze.” When exhibited at the Paris Salon it drew derision from critics who assumed that its physical realism was due to being directly cast from a human model. Rodin was so angered by this spurious charge that he never again created anything in human scale.
The exhibit at the Clark Art Institute documents the American discovery of Rodin. In his first stateside exhibit in Philadelphia, his work was largely ignored. In 1893 at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition his figures were considered so erotic in that Victorian age that they were cordoned off and could only be viewed by request.
The show ignited one of many scandals for Rodin. Those sculptures, Le Normand-Romain said, were “very natural and too strong a study of (anatomical) nature, which disturbed the American people.”
Nevertheless, that same year New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art made its first Rodin acquisition and 15 years later created a gallery for his art.
Rodin was commissioned to create a statue of the Frenchman Honore de Balzac, considered to be among the founders of the modern, realistic novel. Ever the eccentric, the writer would work long hours in his bathrobe, sipping volumes of coffee while in a fog of tobacco smoke. When the sculptor’s image was unveiled there was a tsunami of protest. One critic dismissed it as “a toad in a sack.” The commission was withdrawn.
The Clark exhibit displays Rodin’s last working of the writer’s head and there’s a model of what would become a larger than life statue.
Collecting Rodin’s work gained momentum among the wealthy, ranging from west coast sugar heiress Alma Spreckles to railroad tsar Edward Harriman (who owned one-third of domestic transport). In 1903, the internationally known dancer Loie Fuller organized a New York show of drawings and sculpture. She also lobbied for a museum to be dedicated to his art. Years later Philadelphia did just that. In 1908 photographers Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen exhibited more than 55 drawings by the artist in New York. The dancers Isadora Duncan, Fuller and Vaslav Nijinsky all posed for Rodin and he counted among his friends many of the Impressionists as well as such composers as Claude Debussy.
When Rodin was in his prime, the sculptor Constantin Brancusi was a student, just beginning studies in the art. It was suggested that he be taken on as Rodin’s apprentice. “For my part I refused,” Brancusi said. “Nothing grows in the shade of great trees.”
Rodin was a profligate womanizer while maintaining a half-century relationship with Rose Beuret, an uneducated seamstress who became a model for many of his works. She bore him a son, whom the sculptor spent a lifetime ignoring.
When in his mid-40s, Rodin began a long-term relationship with one of his apprentices, 19-year-old Camille Claudel. She was not just a lover, she was a muse and many writers believe that she freed him in his artistic strivings. Upon breaking from Rodin, her life spiraled to tragedy and she destroyed all but 90 of her works. Those remaining creations are considered brilliant. The exhibit displays a bust of Rodin she created in 1892, one of the few which she ever sold. Claudel spent the last 30 years on Earth in an asylum. A 1988 French film details her life.
Both women were subjects for Rodin’s sculptures and drawings. He used a variety of mediums when working with paper and produced images quickly, looking only at the model as the completed sketches flew to the floor. The images are primarily nude and female.
“My drawings are the result of my sculpture,” Rodin once said.
In his last years, despite his wealth, he maintained a studio at the rabbit-infested Hotel Biron where it was said that the plumbing was hopeless and the heating no better. Many neighbors wanted the structure razed. Among the tenants were the surrealist Jean Cocteau and the painter Henri Matisse.
Following extensive renovations, the Parisian hotel became the Musee Rodin in 1919. Sixty-seven miles to the southwest is the Musee Camille Claudel.
Less than a year before his passing and two weeks before she died, Rodin married Rose Beuret.
Rodin in the United States continues through Sept. 18. The art of Tauba Auerbach, Yuji Agematsu and Jose Posada remain until early Oct. The Tomm El-Saieh exhibit runs through Jan. 8. Admission: $20; Ages 21 and under and students w/ID, free. Open daily 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Aug. /Closed Mondays, Sept. to June.