DiscoverFrance! home page

Recommend Us! Guest Book Advertising Web Hosting Site Map Help! E-mail

.

Culture, history,
language, travel,
and more!

.
.
GO!
Pull down window to select topic, then click GO!

 

Art History Webmasters Association

Enter your e-mail address to receive updates about
DiscoverFrance.net!

World Wide Arts Resources

Search terms:

In Association with Amazon.com

Bonjour!

Vote for this website!

DISCOVER FRANCE
TRAVEL CENTER

Airline Tickets

Car Rentals

Currency

Hotels, Condos

Medical

Rail Passes

This menu is powered
by Agum Network

Search this site

Click above to
search this site
or the Internet.

Visit our Boutique!

Click above
to visit our
Boutique!

Music while you browse

Click above for
optional background
music while you browse!

Random quote generator

Click above to see
random quotations!

visiteur numéro

E-stat

Art Boutique - a Supergallery for French Art Prints and Framing
PLEASE VISIT OUR ART BOUTIQUE TO PURCHASE XXXXX PRINTS


AUGUSTE RODIN

One of the greatest and most prolific sculptors of the 19th century, Auguste Rodin {roh-dan'}, b. Nov. 12, 1840, d. Nov. 17, 1917, succeeded, often contentiously, in bringing new life and direction to a dying art. Rodin portrait Today major collections of his work on permanent display are at the Musée Rodin (Hotel Biron, Paris), the Rodin Museum (Philadelphia), and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor (San Francisco).

The son of a minor employee of the Parisian police department, Rodin enrolled at the age of 14 in the Ecole Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques, a school that trained craftsmen and decorative artists. Rodin began (1857) earning his living as a studio helper on ornamental detail for other sculptors. At the same time he found time to work at home on his own projects and to continue studies in anatomy and, with Antoine Louis Barye, in sculpture.

In 1875-76, after an exhilarating trip to Italy and firsthand knowledge of the sculptures of Michelangelo, Rodin completed his first masterwork, The Vanquished, a young male nude later called The Age of Bronze. This sculpture led to the first of numerous public controversies that were to beset Rodin throughout his career. Accustomed to the highly artificial appearance of most 19th-century academic sculpture, the critics of the day refused to believe that Rodin was able to model a figure so realistically without using plaster casts of a live model. In 1880 he received a commission from the French government to design monumental doors for a proposed new museum, a work that preoccupied him for the rest of his life. His starting point was Dante's Inferno, but the many figures he created in plaster for his Gates of Hell -- including models for The Thinker (1880) and The Kiss (1886) -- came to represent the sculptor's own vision of humanity's anguished progress.

During the 1880s, Rodin became one of the most successful French artists. He received many commissions for public monuments, including The Burghers of Calais (1884-95), the Monument to Victor Hugo (1889-1909), and the Monument to Balzac (1891-98). le PenseurAlthough Rodin regarded this last work -- a dramatic portrayal of Balzac's spirit -- to be one of his greatest, the society that commissioned it rejected the piece as an unfinished and grotesque botch. This led to one of the most bitter public debates in the history of 19th-century art.

Rodin was not only a sculptor of public monuments but a tireless artist who produced numerous small and intimate sculptures. These works range from highly developed pieces such as Eternal Spring (1884) and The Kiss, two of his most popular studies of youthful passion, to fragmentary studies of limbs and heads. He was also much in demand as a portrait sculptor and produced memorable images of many of the most famous men and women of his time, ranging from Victor Hugo (1883) to George Bernard Shaw (1906) and Pope Benedict XV (1915), and of many society figures on both sides of the Atlantic.

After 1900, Rodin worked mostly on a smaller scale, for example, on studies of ballet dancers (c.1910-12) and on drawings. The outbreak of World War I in 1914 brought him considerable hardship; his health and mental stability gave way rapidly before his death in 1917.


John L. Tancock
Source: The Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, Release #9.01, ©1997
Bibliography: Ruth Bulter, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (1993); Robert Descharmes and Jean François Chabrun, Auguste Rodin, trans. by E. Lausanne (1967); Albert E. Elsen, Rodin's Gates of Hell (1960; repr. 1985); Frederic V. Grunfeld, Rodin: A Biography (1987); William H. Hale, The World of Rodin (1969); Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. by J. Lemont and H. Trausil (1945; repr. 1974); Denys Sutton, Triumphant Satyr (1966); John L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, rev. ed. (1976; repr. 1989).
Images: "Rodin: photo of the artist" (The Bettmann Archive), "le Penseur (The Thinker)" (Musée Rodin, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library)
Copyrights Notice and Disclaimer: Images of artists' works displayed throughout this site have been obtained from numerous sources, including digital libraries at educational institutions, educational software, and Mark Harden's Artchive. Credit is attributed when known. Some works are considered to be in the public domain, based on current U.S. and international copyright acts. For more information on copyright laws, please refer to the Artists Rights Society and Benedict O'Mahoney's The Copyright Web Site. [See also: DiscoverFrance.net Copyrights.]

Rodin Links:

The Age of Bronze (1876)
First shown in Brussels and later in Paris during 1877 -- now on exhibit at the New Orleans Museum of Art, The Age of Bronze was one of Rodin's most significant early works. The scandal which ensued after its first exhibition established his artistic reputation.

She Who Was the Helmet-Maker's Beautiful Wife
This sculpture, dated circa 1889-90, is part of the permanent collection at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California. The title refers to a 15th-century ballad by the French poet François Villon, in which an old woman laments her lost youth and beauty.

Did you know: The LaBrea tar pits, dramatized in the 1997 movie "Volcano" (Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche), are located directly behind the museum in Hancock Park.

Webmuseum: Auguste Rodin
The prolific Nicholas Pioch offers insights on Rodin's life, as well as several close-up views of the artist's work.

SUGGEST A SITE
Do you know of a great Rodin site we should list here? Please submit it!

Rodin Quotations:

"Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely." (1)

"Nobody does good to man with impunity." (2)

"Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit of which Nature herself is animated." (3)

"The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation." (4)

"To the artist there is never anything ugly in nature." (5)

Sources of Quotations: (1-5) QuoteWorld.org.

Artists' Pages:

Art Topics:

This menu is powered by Agum Network

Discover France web ring

This ring site owned by DiscoverFrance.net

Features

Books & Videos

Revisit the era of the "Lost Generation" in Hemingway's Paris.

Explore the fascinating history of the prophet from Provence, Nostradamus.

Read the reviews of our carefully selected travel guides and recommended reading, then click to save 20-40% on books you purchase, with the convenience of home delivery.

Can't find your favorite French movies at the video store or library? Check out our selection of videotapes and DVDs featuring French movie icons like Depardieu, Deneuve, Montand, and many more. Then click to save 10-30% on your own personal copy delivered to your door!

Submissions

Host your web page with us!

DiscoverFrance.net actively encourages topical submissions from students of French language & culture, educators, seasoned travelers, American expatriates, and natives of France.

If you would like to share your experiences, knowledge or research with thousands of our visitors and friends, please send a note to the webmaster!

Are you an individual or business with a web page on any topic related to France -- arts, culture, entertainment, history, language, tourism, etc. -- in English or French? Your site can have an address of "www. discoverfrance. net/your_site" for less than $10 per month! Get more hits by affiliating with other francophile sites.

Tired of the Java commercial advertising windows and banners imposed by the so-called "free" web page hosting services? At DiscoverFrance.net, you can customize your page as you wish, without any commercial requirements or programming inserted into your HTML. Our web servers and Internet connections are fast, too.

For more information, please contact our sales staff!


Design and layout © 1997-1999

All Rights Reserved

Comments, suggestions,
broken links?

Made with Macintosh

The Wharton Group
and
Ian C. Mills

e-mail

The Y29K - compliant computer
preferred by designers everywhere.

This site
recycled

recycled

uses
electrons.

E-mail:
webmaster@discoverfrance.net

Text copyrights are attributed to their respective sources throughout this site.