We can remember Auguste Rodin as the sculptor of The Kiss and The Thinker, as the priapic avant-gardist of legendary romances, and as the maker of great monuments — to Balzac, Victor Hugo, the Burghers of Calais. But we surely cannot understand him entirely unless we appreciates his early days and, in particular, the job prospects of a great sculptor in mid-19th-century France.
Antoine-Louise Barye began his career designing badges and buttons for uniforms; Henri Chapu won the Prix de Rome and yet went on to sculpt in lard for a pork butcher; and Emmanuel Frémiet became a make-up man for an embalmer. This was not a great age to be a great sculptor, but it was a fine time to be an ornamenter. Rodin, too, had to play his part, and he spent 20 years working as a craftsman. “Sometimes,” he recalled, “(I produced) earrings for a goldsmith, sometimes decorative figures with torsos three metres high.” It was the making of him.
Next week the Royal Academy of Art is opening a deliciously wideranging survey of Rodin; it’s the first major show of his work in Britain in 20 years and it touches on everything from his love of the antique to his drawings of unposed models. Unfortunately, little remains of those early years, but the show looks at all of Rodin’s greatest works and even includes his chef d’oeuvre, The Gates of Hell, the 6m-high (20ft) doors that were commissioned for a projected museum of decorative arts in Paris. So, what with another Rodin show at Kettle’s Yard Gallery in Cambridge, and a commercial exhibition at Coskun in Mayfair, Britain is the best place to see Rodin this autumn.
And perhaps it is this that has prompted a little boldness from the curators at the Academy, for one of the central themes of the show is Rodin’s involvement with Britain. Critics and collectors were faster to appreciate Rodin than those in France (though the Royal Academy was not exactly in the vanguard) and Rodin came to love London: “Nothing can be more beautiful,” he once said, “than the rich, dark, ruddy tones of the London buildings in the grey and golden haze of the afternoon.” Nevertheless it was Second Empire Paris that made him, honing his great skills as a carver.
He was born in a working class district of Paris in 1840, the son of a clerk in the police force, and although he showed early promise as both a sculptor and draughtsman, he failed three times to gain entrance to the École des Beaux-Arts, and that in part explains his years as a craftsman. It was 1877, and he was nearly 40, before he achieved his first succès de scandale with The Age of Bronze. Viewers were disturbed by the vagueness of the subject and the suggestion that this was simply an ordinary naked man (so suspicious were they, and so impressed by the sculpture’s liveliness, that they accused Rodin of surmoulage — of casting from life — an accusation he was to hear more than once).
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Rodin had learnt the techniques of decoration only to stand them on their head. He would do so once again, four years later, when he presented salon audiences with St John the Baptist: it was described as “the loudest clap of thunder that has been heard in France for a hundred years”. And he would offend yet again when he unveiled his monument to Balzac (after a seven-year prevarication, he clothed the novelist in a dressing gown). And while he enjoyed this success, he was offending those close to him with his sexual exploits: his relationship with Rose Beuret, with whom he had a child, endured rather than prospered, and when Rodin died in 1917 he left behind a cache of intimate drawings of his models which could have only come from the pen of a man who was sharing a bed with them.
Of course, scandals age quickly, and looking at Rodin’s work today we can be more inclined to see its proximity to academic figurative sculpture than to nascent modernism. We have unfortunately come to see sculptures such as The Kiss, The Thinker and The Age of Bronze as paragons of high art, though their significance lies precisely in the fact that they embody modern moods and attitudes stripped of such elevation. Rodin did away with the plinth and presented symbols denuded of the conventional dressing of classical allegory. His figures aren’t beautified into perfect ideals.
For some he was the Zola of sculpture, and to understand this one only has to look at The Burghers of Calais. It was commissioned to commemorate the events that followed the siege of Calais by English forces under Edward III in 1347. The city had capitulated, but the King offered to spare it from sack if, in the words of the French chronicler Jean Froissart, “sixe of the chief burgesses of the towne come out bare heeded, bare foted, and bare legged, and in their shertes, with haulters about their neckes, with the keyes of the towne and castell in their handes, and lette theym sixe yelde themselfe purely to my wyll.” Thus they did, and thus a monument to the six was produced by Rodin, based on Froissart’s account, and unveiled outside the town hall in Calais in 1895. Rodin clothed them in rags, not ideals, and let their nobility rise out from the harrowing realism.
Yet if Rodin was another Zola, a modernist, he was a man of the Renaissance, too, and nowhere is this more apparent than in The Gates of Hell. They might have been only doors, but in composing them the sculptor confronted a giant precedent: the doors that Lorenzo Ghiberti had produced for the baptistry of Florence Cathedral in the early 15th century.
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Ghiberti had employed a series of panels to record his biblical narrative, and initially Rodin intended to use the same device to sequence his series of images of Hell, drawn from Dante’s Divine Comedy. But after looking at images of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel, he abandoned the scheme for a fluid arrangement of the damned bodies, naked figures rising and falling, fragmented limbs coming into view and disappearing below the surface in a tumult of movement which encapsulated all of Rodin’s ideas about sculpture.
Some 180 figures covered the surface by the time he was done, and such was the preparation and the quality of the ideas that went into the Gates that Rodin saved some of the figures from the flames and made them into larger works, including The Kiss and Fugit Amor.
Eventually, plans for an equivalent of the Victoria and Albert Museum in Paris were abandoned, but Rodin just kept on returning to the designs for the Gates. “I shall find something to do on my works for years,” he would tell journalists. “They would be dead if they were definite.”