Auguste Rodin

The life and work of Auguste Rodin, the sculptor widely regarded as the father of modern sculpture, is the story of how a poor and nearsighted Parisian boy, rejected three times by the official art school of his nation, spent half a lifetime in obscure decorative labor before transforming the most conservative of the visual arts. When Rodin was born in 1840, sculpture in France was a craft governed by rules. Marble figures were expected to be smooth, idealized, and noble, the human body purified into a calm and bloodless perfection. By the time Rodin died in 1917, that whole order had been overturned, and it had been overturned in large part by him. He gave sculpture back its skin, its muscle, its breath, and its anguish. He made the unfinished surface a thing of beauty, the broken fragment a complete work, and the trembling of light across rough bronze a vehicle for the deepest human feeling.

To understand why Auguste Rodin is considered the father of modern sculpture, it helps to grasp how long and how completely the world ignored him first. He did not enter the public consciousness as a prodigy. He failed the entrance examination of the École des Beaux-Arts not once but three times. He worked for nearly two decades as an anonymous ornament-maker, modeling decorative flourishes for the studios of more successful men, his own name attached to almost nothing. He was nearly forty years old before a single major work bore his signature in the public eye, and even that work, The Age of Bronze, arrived wrapped in a humiliating accusation of fraud. Rodin's was a career built slowly, against resistance, by a man who simply would not stop working, and the patience of those obscure years is inseparable from the force of what came after.

What came after was a body of work that changed the art permanently. The Thinker, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, the towering and unfinished Gates of Hell, the scandalous Monument to Balzac, the marble portraits and the thousands of swift, sensual drawings: these are among the most recognized images Western art has produced, reproduced so endlessly that it takes an effort to see them freshly. Rodin's revolution was not a matter of subject alone. It lay in his conviction that sculpture should render not a frozen ideal but a living truth, that the trace of the artist's own thumb in the clay was worth more than any polished smoothness, that a body in fragments could express more than a body whole. He treated the human figure as a landscape of hollows and ridges across which light moved, and he insisted that movement, emotion, and even the failures and accidents of the working process belonged inside the finished art.

This is the life behind those works, told from a cramped apartment in the Latin Quarter of Paris to a cold villa above the Seine where, in the last winter of the First World War, the old sculptor died. It is the story of an artistic revolution, and it is also the story of a complicated and often difficult man: the lifelong, half-secret companion Rose Beuret, who waited fifty-three years to become his wife; the gifted and tormented Camille Claudel, his student, collaborator, and lover, whose own genius was overshadowed and whose life ended in tragedy; the assistants and rivals; the patrons and enemies; the long fight for every commission. Rodin was generous and selfish, devoted to work above all things and careless of the people who loved him, ambitious, sensual, stubborn, and finally, after so much waiting, world-famous. Anyone who wants to know how modern sculpture was born must begin with him.

A Paris Childhood in the Family of Jean-Baptiste Rodin

François-Auguste-René Rodin was born in Paris on the twelfth of November 1840, in a modest apartment in the Latin Quarter, the old student and working district on the left bank of the Seine. The family was of the lower middle class, respectable, hardworking, and without money to spare. His father, Jean-Baptiste Rodin, came originally from Normandy and held a minor post as a clerk in the Prefecture of Police; he was a man of orderly habits, conventional piety, and limited means, the kind of small official whose whole ambition for his children rarely rose above a secure clerkship of their own. His mother, Marie Cheffer, came from Lorraine, in the east of France, and was a devout Catholic of a quiet, undemonstrative kind. The household was governed by religion, thrift, and routine. There was nothing in it, on the surface, to predict the emergence of a great artist.

Auguste had an older sister, Maria, two years his senior, to whom he was deeply attached and whose early death would later mark one of the darkest passages of his young life. The two children grew up together in cramped quarters, the family moving from one modest address to another in the streets around the rue de l'Arbalète and the Latin Quarter. France in the 1840s was a country of political turbulence and rapid change; Rodin was a small boy of seven when the revolution of 1848 swept away the monarchy of Louis-Philippe, and a youth when Louis-Napoléon made himself emperor as Napoléon III. But the great events of the age touched the Rodin household only at its edges. What shaped the boy was nearer at hand: the poverty that was never quite destitution, the religion that filled the calendar, and, above everything, a physical handicap that would influence his whole development as an artist.

Rodin was severely nearsighted. His myopia was so pronounced that the ordinary work of the schoolroom, the reading of small print, the copying of text from a distant blackboard, was a torment to him. He could not see what other children saw, and the conventional education of the period, which depended heavily on reading, writing, and rote recitation, was therefore closed to him almost from the start. He was a poor scholar, not from any want of intelligence but because the entire apparatus of learning was pitched at a focal length his eyes could not reach. What he could do, from the earliest age anyone remembered, was draw. The boy who could not read a printed page with comfort could hold a pencil close to his face and make marks on paper, and he made them constantly, covering whatever surfaces came to hand, copying the prints that wrapped his family's groceries. Drawing was the one activity in which his defective sight became almost an advantage, forcing him to look closely, intimately, at the near and tangible world.

When Auguste was about nine or ten years old, around 1851, his parents sent him away to board at a school in Beauvais, a town north of Paris, run by his uncle Alexandre Rodin. The experiment was not a success. The boy was unhappy away from home, and the academic curriculum defeated him as thoroughly in Beauvais as it had in Paris. He learned little Latin and less mathematics, and his uncle's reports cannot have been encouraging. After two or three years he returned to Paris around 1853 or 1854, an adolescent with almost no formal education to show for his schooling, no prospect of the clerkly career his father would have wished, and only one demonstrable talent. It was at this point, faced with a son who could not be made into a scholar but who would not stop drawing, that the family made the decision that set the whole future course of his life. They allowed him to try for a training in art.

It was a brave decision for people of their means, and it should be understood for what it was. The Rodins were not patrons of the arts; they had no connections in that world and no money to subsidize a long and uncertain apprenticeship. To let a son pursue drawing was to gamble the family's slender resources on a path that led, for most who attempted it, not to fame but to a precarious living as a craftsman, a decorator, an anonymous hand in someone else's workshop. The school they could afford was not the grand and prestigious one. It was a humbler institution, designed precisely to train the skilled artisans that a growing industrial city required. But for the fourteen-year-old Auguste Rodin, enrolled in 1854, it was a door, and behind that door, for the first time in his life, he found himself among teachers and fellow students who shared the one thing he could do.

The Petite École and the Teaching of Lecoq De Boisbaudran

The school Rodin entered in 1854 was the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques, known to everyone in Paris simply as the Petite École, the "little school," to distinguish it from the great and famous École des Beaux-Arts. The distinction mattered enormously. The Beaux-Arts trained painters and sculptors for the highest reaches of the official art world, for the Salon, the state commissions, the academic honors. The Petite École trained craftsmen: designers for textiles and porcelain, decorative modelers, ornamentists, the skilled hands of the applied and industrial arts. To be a student there was, in the rigid hierarchy of nineteenth-century French art, to be marked from the outset as an artisan rather than an artist. Rodin would spend years climbing out of that category, and in a sense he never wholly escaped the suspicion of it. But the Petite École also gave him something the grander institution might never have: a teacher of genius.

That teacher was Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, an instructor of drawing whose ideas were unconventional, original, and, as it turned out, perfectly suited to the boy in front of him. The standard academic method of the period taught drawing through the patient, mechanical copying of approved models, plaster casts of antique statues, engravings of old master works, the same idealized forms reproduced again and again until the student's hand had been disciplined into conformity. Lecoq de Boisbaudran distrusted this. He believed that copying alone produced lifeless and derivative work, and he developed instead a method built around the training of visual memory. His students were made to study an object intently, then to put it away and draw it from memory, reconstructing it out of what the mind had genuinely absorbed rather than what the eye could lazily trace. The aim was to forge a direct, vital connection between observation and execution, to teach the hand to serve a remembered truth.

For Auguste Rodin this method was a liberation. The boy whose defective eyes had defeated him in every conventional classroom now found himself in a classroom that rewarded exactly his strength: the capacity for close, concentrated, retentive looking. Drawing from memory suited a sensibility that had always been forced to examine the near world intensely. Under Lecoq de Boisbaudran's training Rodin developed the foundation of everything that followed, the habit of seeing form as something to be understood from within rather than merely traced from without, the conviction that art must capture life and not merely its surface appearance. Decades later, at the height of his fame, Rodin spoke of Lecoq de Boisbaudran with lasting gratitude, and the great drawings of his maturity, rapid, economical, alive with movement, are unthinkable without the discipline of those early years.

The Petite École also introduced Rodin to clay, and the introduction was decisive. At around the age of seventeen he entered the modeling class, and the moment he put his hands into the soft, yielding material he understood, with a certainty he never afterward doubted, what he was meant to do. He later described the experience of modeling for the first time in language close to ecstasy; it was, he said, as if he ascended into heaven. The flat surface of the drawing, however much he loved it, could not hold him as the third dimension did. Clay could be pushed, pressed, hollowed, built up; it answered the touch of the fingers; it allowed form to be discovered rather than merely depicted. From that point forward Rodin's vocation was fixed. He would be a sculptor. Everything else, the years of decorative drudgery still ahead, the rejections, the poverty, would be endured in the service of that single certainty.

Among his fellow students at the Petite École were several who would matter to French art, including the sculptor Jules Dalou and the artist Alphonse Legros, both of whom became lifelong acquaintances and, in the shifting way of artistic friendships, sometime rivals. The school placed Rodin within a community of working talent, gave him technical competence in drawing and modeling, and instilled in him a method of seeing that he never abandoned. But it could not give him the one thing the official world demanded as a passport to a serious artistic career: admission to the École des Beaux-Arts. The Petite École was, by design, a terminus for craftsmen, not a stepping-stone for artists. For Rodin to cross from one world to the other, he would have to present himself at the gate of the grande école and be judged worthy. He presented himself, and he was judged, and the judgment was no.

Three Rejections from the École Des Beaux-Arts

Around 1857, his training at the Petite École substantially complete, Auguste Rodin applied for admission to the École des Beaux-Arts, the supreme art school of France and the gateway to every official honor a sculptor could hope to win. He submitted a clay model for the entrance competition. He was rejected. He applied again, and was rejected again. He applied a third time, and a third time the answer was no. Three times the young man who would come to be regarded as the greatest sculptor of his age, the father of modern sculpture, was turned away from the institution charged with identifying and training the nation's sculptural talent. The episode is one of the most quietly astonishing facts in the history of art, and it deserves to be understood rather than merely noted, because the reasons for those rejections reveal the whole gulf between Rodin and the official taste of his time.

The fault was not a lack of skill. Rodin at seventeen was already, by the testimony of everyone who saw him work, a modeler of unusual gifts. The fault, rather, was that he had been trained in the wrong place and in the wrong manner. The professors who judged the Beaux-Arts entrance competitions were steeped in a particular ideal of sculpture, a smooth, restrained, classicizing manner descended from the eighteenth century and from the lingering authority of the antique. They wanted clarity of contour, calm of expression, an idealized treatment of the body that subdued the particular into the general. Rodin, shaped by the Petite École and by Lecoq de Boisbaudran and by his own instinct, modeled in another way entirely. His clay was alive with the marks of observation, with the bumps and hollows of real flesh, with a vigorous, irregular surface that the academic eye read as coarseness, as a failure of finish, as the unmistakable manner of an artisan rather than an artist. He was, in the strict sense, modeling in the style of an earlier century, closer to the robust naturalism of eighteenth-century French sculpture than to the chilly neoclassicism the juries rewarded, and the juries did not recognize it as quality. They recognized it as the wrong thing.

It is worth pausing on the irony, because it is not a small one. The École des Beaux-Arts existed to find sculptural genius, and sculptural genius presented itself, three times, at its door, and three times the institution failed to see it. The failure was not personal malice; it was the structural blindness of an academy so certain of its own standards that work departing from them could only be read as incompetence. The same blindness would dog Rodin for the next twenty years and would surface again, magnified, in the great public controversies of his maturity, the accusation of fraud over The Age of Bronze, the rejection of the Balzac monument. The official art world and Auguste Rodin were, from this first encounter, fundamentally at odds, and the long story of his career is in large part the story of how that world was eventually compelled, against its own deepest instincts, to acknowledge him.

For the young man himself, in 1857, the three rejections were a heavy blow with immediate and practical consequences. Without the Beaux-Arts there would be no scholarship, no formal path toward the Prix de Rome, no orderly ascent through the official hierarchy. Whatever Rodin was to become, he would have to become it on his own, outside the system, supporting himself by his hands while he learned by his own efforts what the academy would not teach him. The decision was effectively made for him: he would earn his living as a decorative craftsman, an ornamentist, one of the army of skilled but anonymous modelers who supplied the building boom of Second Empire Paris with its caryatids and cornices, its masks and garlands and architectural flourishes. He was not yet twenty, and the great works were more than two decades away.

In later years, when honors were heaped upon him and the academies that had spurned him competed to claim him, Rodin spoke of the rejections without bitterness and even with a kind of gratitude. He came to believe that the Beaux-Arts would have ground the originality out of him, disciplined his living surfaces into dead correctness, made him a competent academic sculptor and nothing more. There is something to the claim, though it is also the serene retrospective wisdom of a man who had won. At the time, the rejections were simply rejections, and the road they forced him onto was long, hard, and obscure. But that road, the road of the working craftsman learning his art in the cold and on his own, turned out to be the road by which modern sculpture arrived.

The Death of Maria and the Year in the Cloister

In 1862, when Rodin was twenty-one years old and still at the very beginning of his struggle, a private catastrophe struck that nearly ended his artistic life before it had truly begun. His beloved older sister, Maria, died. She was only twenty-four. Maria had suffered a disappointment in love, an unhappy attachment to a young man, and in the wake of that grief she had withdrawn from the world and entered a convent. There, not long after taking the veil, she fell ill and died, the cause generally given as peritonitis. For Auguste the loss was devastating. He and Maria had been close all their lives, the two children of that cramped and pious household, and her death plunged him into a despair so profound that it shook the foundations of everything, including his confidence in his vocation.

Rodin blamed himself for Maria's unhappiness. The young man whose attentions had wounded her had, by some accounts, first been a friend of Auguste's, even an acquaintance he had introduced into the family circle, and the grieving brother turned that connection into guilt. Overwhelmed by sorrow and self-reproach, and perhaps also by the accumulated weight of his own failures, the rejections, the poverty, the dispiriting decorative labor, Rodin underwent a religious crisis. He turned away from art altogether. In a state of spiritual extremity he resolved to renounce the world, as his sister had done, and to give himself to God. He entered a Catholic religious congregation, the Order of the Blessed Sacrament, a community founded only a few years earlier by a priest named Pierre-Julien Eymard, and for a period in 1862 and 1863 the future father of modern sculpture lived as a novice, dressed in the habit, intending to become a lay brother.

That Rodin did not remain in the cloister, and that modern sculpture therefore came into being, is owed to the discernment of one man: Father Pierre-Julien Eymard himself, the founder of the order, later canonized as a saint of the Catholic Church. Eymard was a figure of genuine spiritual authority, and he was also, crucially, perceptive about the young novice in his care. He observed Rodin closely. He saw the grief, and he respected it, but he also saw something the grief was trying to bury: an artistic gift of extraordinary power, a vocation as real and as God-given, in Eymard's view, as any call to the religious life. Rodin, during his months in the community, modeled a portrait bust of Father Eymard, and the bust, vigorous, searching, alive, was itself the clearest possible evidence of where the young man's true calling lay. Eymard concluded that Rodin did not belong in the order. Far from encouraging him to stay, the priest counseled him, firmly and kindly, to leave, to return to the world, and to become the sculptor he was so plainly meant to be.

It was an act of rare wisdom, and Rodin never forgot it. He left the Order of the Blessed Sacrament and took up his clay again, and the brief episode of the cloister, which might have swallowed his talent entirely, instead became a closed and finished chapter, a passage of grief survived. The bust of Eymard survives too, an early work but a striking one, and it carries a small and famous oddity: the way Rodin modeled the priest's hair, sweeping up from the brow, produced two pointed forms that look unmistakably like little horns, and Eymard, when he saw them, was not entirely pleased. The detail is usually told as an anecdote, but it also shows something true about Rodin even at twenty-two. He modeled what he saw, the actual masses and movements of the actual head, and he let the result stand even when it discomfited the sitter. The instinct that the academy had rejected, the refusal to subordinate observed truth to flattering convention, was already, in the year of his deepest despair, unmistakably his.

When Rodin emerged from the religious crisis he was changed. The grief for Maria did not vanish, and a current of melancholy, of preoccupation with mortality and suffering, runs through his art for the rest of his life. But the crisis had also, paradoxically, confirmed his vocation. Tested against the most absolute of alternatives, the renunciation of the world for God, his need to make sculpture had proved the stronger, and it had been ratified by a holy man's blessing. He returned to Paris, to poverty, to the decorative grind, and to the patient, unglamorous business of becoming an artist with no institution behind him and no reputation to his name. He was twenty-two years old. The recognition that the world would one day give him lay fifteen years in the future. What lay immediately ahead was a young woman, a son, and the long apprenticeship of obscure and exhausting work.

Rose Beuret and the Long Years of Decorative Labor

In 1864 Auguste Rodin met Rose Beuret, and the meeting bound the two of them together for the remaining fifty-three years of his life. Rose was a young woman of the Paris working class, a seamstress from the Champagne countryside who had come to the city to earn her living with her needle. She was strong, loyal, uneducated, and possessed of a vivid physical beauty that the sculptor recognized at once. She became his model, posing for some of the earliest works in which his mature power begins to show, and she became, almost immediately, the companion of his life. They set up a household together. They never, for more than half a century, formally married, and the omission tells a good deal about Rodin: about his absorption in his work, his reluctance to be bound, his capacity to take devotion for granted. Rose gave him exactly that, an unconditional devotion, and she gave it through poverty, neglect, infidelity, and obscurity, asking for the legal recognition of marriage only at the very end, when both of them were old and dying.

On the eighteenth of January 1866 Rose bore Rodin a son, who was given the name Auguste-Eugène Beuret, the mother's surname rather than the father's. Rodin never formally acknowledged the boy as his legitimate child, and the relationship between the sculptor and his son was, throughout both their lives, distant and unhappy. The younger Auguste, neglected and without education, grew into a limited and troubled man who never found a secure place in the world or in his father's regard. It is one of the persistent shadows over Rodin's biography, this failure of ordinary fatherhood, and it belongs to the same pattern as his treatment of Rose: a man whose creative generosity was boundless and whose personal generosity, toward the people closest to him, was often meager. Work came first, always, and the human beings in the household arranged themselves around the work as best they could.

Those were years of genuine hardship. Rodin and Rose lived in poverty, and the sculptor's working conditions were wretched. For a time he rented, as a studio, a former stable, a space so cold and damp that it actively destroyed his work; the water in the clay froze, and finished and half-finished pieces cracked and crumbled in the frost. An unknown number of Rodin's early sculptures were lost this way, broken by the cold of the only studio he could afford. To survive, he did what the three rejections from the Beaux-Arts had condemned him to do: he hired out his hands. From 1864 onward, and for many years, Rodin worked as an assistant in the busy commercial studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, one of the most successful decorative sculptors of the Second Empire, a prolific manufacturer of the ornamental sculpture, the vases and candelabra and architectural decoration, that the prosperous classes of imperial France consumed in quantity.

The arrangement was, for Rodin, both a lifeline and a humiliation. Carrier-Belleuse ran what amounted to a sculpture factory, and Rodin was one of its skilled anonymous hands, modeling decorative work that went out into the world under his employer's name. For year after year the most gifted sculptor in France produced ornament that the public admired without ever knowing who had made it. There was no signature, no recognition, no career being built in any visible sense. And yet the years were not wasted, and Rodin himself, later, refused to dismiss them. The decorative grind was also a prolonged and rigorous technical education. It taught him, as no academy could have, the practical mastery of his material: how clay behaved, how plaster was cast, how a form had to be constructed to read in three dimensions and to catch the light. It schooled his hands in sheer fluency. The decorative work also kept him in contact with the eighteenth-century French tradition, the lively, sensuous, naturalistic manner of sculptors like Clodion, whose spirit pervaded the ornamental trade, and that tradition, despised by the academy, fed directly into Rodin's own emerging style.

Still, it was obscurity, and it lasted an extraordinarily long time. Through the middle and later 1860s Rodin modeled ornament for Carrier-Belleuse, lived in poverty with Rose and their small son, lost work to the frost, and submitted, when he could, his own independent pieces to the official Salon, where they were generally refused. He was approaching thirty with nothing to show the world that bore his name. The decorative apprenticeship would soon carry him out of France altogether, to Belgium, where Carrier-Belleuse's business and then a new partnership would occupy six further years of his life. And it was during those Belgian years, far from Paris and still officially nobody, that Rodin at last began to make the works that were his own, and to take the journey, to Italy and the tombs of Michelangelo, that finally set him free.

The Man with the Broken Nose

Among the works Rodin made in the obscure years of the 1860s, while he was modeling ornament for other men and losing sculptures to the cold, one stands apart, and it stands apart so sharply that historians of art often treat it as the true beginning of his career. It is a portrait head, modeled around 1863 and 1864, of an old man with a battered, irregular face, and it is called The Man with the Broken Nose. Small, unidealized, and intensely alive, it was the first work in which the whole of Rodin's originality announced itself, and the story of how it was made and how it was received compresses, into a single object, everything that his early struggle was about.

The model was not a hired professional or a noble sitter but a poor old man of the neighborhood, a local odd-job man and handyman known by the nickname Bibi, who scraped a living at the edges of the district where Rodin lived. His face was the opposite of a classical ideal: weathered, lined, asymmetrical, the nose itself flattened and broken, the whole physiognomy a record of a long, hard, ordinary life. To the academic taste of the time such a face was simply not a fit subject for serious sculpture, which was supposed to ennoble and to generalize. Rodin saw it differently. He saw in Bibi's ruined face a beauty of a deeper kind, the beauty of truth, of character, of life inscribed in flesh, and he modeled it with a passionate, unflinching attention to every hollow and ridge and the play of light across them. He worked on the head through a Parisian winter, in the bitter cold of his stable studio, and the cold itself then intervened in the work in a way that became part of its history. The clay froze, and the back of the head broke away and fell, leaving the modeled face intact but the cranium behind it open and incomplete.

A conventional sculptor would have regarded the accident as a disaster and either repaired the head or discarded it. Rodin did neither. He looked at what the frost had left him, a face without the back of its skull, a fragment, a kind of mask, and he decided that the fragment was complete. He let it stand. This decision, made by a poor and unknown craftsman over a damaged study in a freezing room, was one of the seminal decisions in the history of modern art. It was the first appearance, in Rodin's work, of an idea that would become central to everything he did and that would echo through the sculpture of the entire twentieth century: the idea that a part can be a whole, that the fragment is not a failure of the complete figure but a legitimate and even superior form of expression, that a face alone, a torso alone, a single gesture, can carry the full charge of art. The Man with the Broken Nose, born partly of deliberate vision and partly of an accident embraced rather than corrected, is where that idea begins.

Rodin submitted The Man with the Broken Nose to the official Salon, the great annual exhibition that was the sole effective gateway to public recognition for a French sculptor, in 1865. The jury rejected it. The reasons were exactly the reasons the Beaux-Arts juries had rejected him years before: the work was not finished in the academic sense, not smooth, not idealized, not noble; it was the unsparing portrait of an ugly old man, modeled with a roughness that the official eye could read only as crudeness. That a jury could look at one of the most penetrating portrait sculptures of the nineteenth century and see merely the incompetent study of an unworthy subject is, like the three rejections, a measure of how far ahead of his judges Rodin already was. The work that the Salon turned away in 1865 is now recognized as a landmark, and Rodin himself, near the end of his life, said that The Man with the Broken Nose was the first good piece of modeling he ever did and that it had, in a sense, determined all his later work.

There is a coda to the story that captures the strange shape of Rodin's career. Years later, in 1875, after he had had the head carved in marble, the very same composition, essentially the same work that had been scorned in 1865, was accepted by the Salon and exhibited without objection. Nothing about the sculpture had changed; what had changed, slightly, was its presentation, the dignity conferred by marble, and perhaps the slow drift of taste. The episode taught Rodin a lesson he never forgot about the official world: that its judgments were not the verdicts of truth but the prejudices of a moment, reversible, arbitrary, and not to be confused with the worth of the work. He would need that lesson. The greatest battles with the official taste of France, the surmoulage scandal, the Balzac, were still ahead of him. But the weapon he would fight them with, the absolute confidence in his own eye against the eye of the academy, had been forged here, over a broken plaster head in a frozen room, in the obscure middle of the 1860s.

The Brussels Years and the Partnership with Van Rasbourg

In 1870 the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and the catastrophe that overwhelmed France also rearranged Rodin's life. He was called up and served briefly in the National Guard, but his crippling nearsightedness made him useless as a soldier, and he was soon discharged. The war shattered the imperial regime and ruined the Paris luxury trade on which decorative sculptors depended; the studio of Carrier-Belleuse, like much of the city's artistic economy, was thrown into disarray. Carrier-Belleuse relocated part of his operations to Brussels, the capital of Belgium, where building and decoration continued and where a sculptor could still find work, and Rodin, with no prospects in a defeated and besieged Paris, followed him there. The move was meant to be temporary. It lasted, in the event, about six years, from 1871 to 1877, and those Belgian years, spent outside France and still in obscurity, were the years in which Auguste Rodin finally became himself.

The arrangement with Carrier-Belleuse did not survive long in Brussels. The two men quarreled, the dispute apparently concerning work that Rodin had executed but that was sold under his employer's name, the old grievance of the anonymous hand, and the partnership ended. Rodin then formed a new professional association with a Belgian sculptor, Antoine-Joseph Van Rasbourg. The two men worked together on decorative and architectural commissions in and around Brussels, and they made a businesslike agreement to divide the credit: works produced for Belgian clients would be signed by Van Rasbourg, while works destined for France would carry Rodin's name. Among the major projects of these years was monumental decorative sculpture for the new Bourse, the Brussels Stock Exchange, a grand public building whose ornamental program gave Rodin steady, demanding, large-scale work. He also produced decorative groups, caryatids, and architectural ornament for buildings across the city. It was, once again, decorative labor, much of it anonymous, but it was decorative labor at a high level, and it kept him and Rose, who had joined him in Belgium, in modest security.

The Brussels years mattered for reasons that went far beyond the commissions. For the first time in his life Rodin had a measure of stability, a partner rather than an employer, and, crucially, time and a little money of his own. He began, in the hours not claimed by decorative work, to model independent figures that answered to nothing but his own developing vision. The Belgian countryside and the slower rhythm of provincial life suited him; Rose was with him; the desperate poverty of the Paris stable was behind him. And Belgium placed him within reach of the museums of the Low Countries, the great tradition of Flemish painting, the Rubenses in the churches of Antwerp, with their surging, muscular, dramatic treatment of the human body. Rodin looked hard at that tradition, and its energy entered his work. The provincial exile that might have buried him instead gave him exactly the conditions, security, time, and freedom, that his long Parisian struggle had denied him.

It was from Brussels, and out of the modest savings of these years, that Rodin financed the journey that he himself, ever afterward, identified as the turning point of his artistic life. In the winter of 1875 and into 1876 he traveled to Italy. He was nearly thirty-five years old. He had been working at sculpture, in one form or another, for two decades. He had been rejected by the Beaux-Arts and by the Salon, had served his long sentence of decorative anonymity, had survived poverty and grief and the religious crisis, and had begun, in Belgium, to find his own voice. What he lacked, still, was the final liberation, the encounter that would show him with absolute clarity what sculpture at its highest could be and give him the courage to pursue it without compromise. He found that encounter in Italy, in the marble of Florence and Rome, and above all in the work of one long-dead master.

The Journey to Italy and the Liberation of Michelangelo

Rodin's Italian journey of 1875 and 1876 took him to the cities where the High Renaissance had reached its summit, and everywhere he went he studied sculpture with the concentrated, devouring attention of a man who had waited his whole life for this. He went to Florence, the city of Donatello and of the Medici, and to Rome, and he looked at everything: the antique marbles, the works of Donatello, whose vivid naturalism spoke directly to his own instincts. But the encounter that overturned everything, the one he spoke of for the rest of his life, was his encounter with the sculpture of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Rodin stood before Michelangelo's figures, the tombs of the Medici in the New Sacristy at Florence, the unfinished Slaves, the great marble bodies straining and twisting and half-emerging from the stone, and he experienced something close to revelation. He filled his notebooks with drawings and analyses, trying to understand the secret of those figures, the source of their tremendous, contained, suffering energy. What he came to understand was not a trick of style but a principle. Michelangelo's bodies were not at rest in the calm equilibrium that the academy prized; they were charged with movement, with tension, with the pull of opposing forces, the torso turning against the hips, the limbs gathered and coiled, the whole figure expressing through its pose a drama of the spirit. Michelangelo modeled the body as the visible vehicle of an inner life, and he was not afraid of strain, of distortion, of the unfinished, of force. Rodin recognized in this the confirmation, on the grandest possible scale and from the greatest possible authority, of his own deepest instincts, the instincts that the École des Beaux-Arts and the Salon juries had told him for twenty years were wrong.

Rodin himself put the matter unforgettably. Michelangelo, he said, had freed him from academicism. The phrase deserves its fame, because it names exactly what happened. For two decades the academic ideal had hung over Rodin as a standard he had failed to meet, a correctness he could not produce, a smoothness and idealization and calm that his own hands kept refusing. Michelangelo showed him that the academy was not the measure of sculpture at all, that the supreme sculptor of the Western tradition had worked in the opposite direction, toward movement, expression, energy, and truth, and that Rodin's own rejected instincts were not failures but were, in fact, the living tradition itself. The Italian journey did not teach Rodin to imitate Michelangelo; he was far too original for that, and his mature work looks nothing like a pastiche of the Renaissance. What Italy gave him was permission, authority, and courage: the certainty that the direction he had always wanted to go was the right direction, and that he could now go all the way.

He returned to Belgium from Italy a transformed artist, and the transformation went straight into the work he had already, before the journey, begun to model. For some time Rodin had been at work on a life-size male nude, a standing figure of a young man, and the Italian experience poured into it. When the figure was finished it embodied everything the journey had unlocked: a complete mastery of the living, moving human body; a surface that breathed; an emotional charge that the academic nude entirely lacked. It was the first fully achieved masterpiece of his career, the work in which the obscure decorative craftsman finally stood revealed as a sculptor of the first rank. He would call it, in the end, The Age of Bronze. And when he exhibited it, the recognition he had waited more than twenty years to receive arrived at last, but it arrived in the most painful disguise imaginable: as an accusation that he was a cheat.

The Age of Bronze and the Scandal of Surmoulage

The Age of Bronze is a life-size standing figure of a naked young man, one arm raised toward his head, the other once holding a staff that Rodin later removed, the body caught in a slow, awakening movement, somewhere between sleep and waking, between collapse and rising. The model was a young Belgian soldier named Auguste Neyt, and Rodin worked on the figure in Brussels over a long period in the mid-1870s, before and after his Italian journey, modeling the body with an attention to anatomical truth, to the play of muscle and the fall of light across living skin, more searching than anything in contemporary academic sculpture. He first exhibited it in Brussels early in 1877, under the title The Vanquished, and then, the same year, he sent it to the great arena he had been excluded from for two decades, the Paris Salon, where it was shown as The Age of Bronze.

The figure was so convincingly alive that it produced, almost at once, a scandal. Critics and fellow sculptors, studying the astonishing naturalism of the body, the precise truth of its surfaces, concluded that no sculptor could have modeled such a thing from imagination and skill alone. They accused Rodin of surmoulage, the fraudulent practice of casting a sculpture directly from the body of a living model, taking a mold from Neyt's actual flesh rather than building the figure by the legitimate labor of modeling. The accusation was, in the hierarchy of artistic crimes, a grave one. To cast from life was to cheat, to substitute a mechanical impression for the creative act, and to be guilty of it was to be no artist at all but a kind of forger. The recognition Rodin had craved for twenty years had finally come, and its first form was the charge that his masterpiece was a fake.

For Rodin the accusation was an agony, and it was also, in a strange way, the supreme compliment, though he was in no condition at the time to appreciate the irony. The charge of surmoulage was, after all, simply the statement that his sculpture was indistinguishable from life, which was precisely what he had spent his career trying to achieve. But it was an accusation of fraud, and it threatened to destroy his reputation at the very moment of its birth. He fought it. He insisted on his innocence, and he set out to prove it. He had photographs taken of the model, Auguste Neyt, posed beside the sculpture, to demonstrate that the proportions of the figure were not in fact identical to the man, that the sculpture was a construction and not a cast. He gathered testimony. He demanded that the authorities investigate properly rather than condemn on rumor.

The vindication, when it came, was slow and grudging, but it came. After Rodin returned to Paris, the controversy continued, and at last a group of established sculptors and officials examined the question seriously. A formal inquiry was conducted; sculptors of standing testified that the figure could not have been produced by casting from life, that it bore everywhere the marks of genuine modeling, that the man was innocent. By 1880 Rodin was officially cleared, and the French state, in a decisive act of recognition, purchased a bronze cast of The Age of Bronze for the nation and saw the figure placed on public view in the Luxembourg Gardens. The accusation of fraud had been answered by the highest possible verdict of authenticity: the state had bought the work.

The surmoulage scandal, painful as it was, turned out to be the making of Rodin's public reputation. Before it he was an unknown; the controversy made his name discussed throughout the Paris art world. The very accusation that his work was indistinguishable from life advertised, more effectively than any praise could have, the extraordinary naturalism of his modeling. And his vindication carried a weight that ordinary success would not have had: he had been charged with the worst crime an artist could commit, and he had been formally and publicly proven innocent. He emerged from the affair, in 1880, at the age of thirty-nine, finally and undeniably a figure to be reckoned with. The state owned one of his sculptures. The officials who had ignored him for twenty years now knew his name. And almost immediately, partly to silence the lingering whispers once and for all, he set about creating a work whose scale alone would make the accusation of casting from life absurd.

Saint John the Baptist and the Winning of Recognition

The most direct answer Rodin could give to the surmoulage accusation was to make a figure that no one could possibly believe had been cast from a living body, and the obvious way to do that was to make it larger than life. A cast taken from a real person produces a figure of exactly human size; a figure visibly bigger than any human being is, by that fact alone, demonstrably a work of modeling. So Rodin set out, in the years around 1878 to 1880, to model a male nude on a scale beyond the natural, and the result was one of the masterpieces of his early maturity, Saint John the Baptist Preaching.

The figure shows a gaunt, intense, naked man striding forward, both feet planted flat on the ground in a pose that is anatomically impossible to hold and yet reads, astonishingly, as the very image of forward movement. One arm is raised, the hand lifted as if in the middle of urgent speech; the head is set with the burning concentration of a prophet in the grip of his message. The model was an Italian peasant, a man named Pignatelli, who had come to Rodin's studio, by the sculptor's own account, off the street, and who, the moment he took up a natural standing position, struck Rodin as the living image of a man of the wilderness, a John the Baptist out of the Gospels. Rodin built the figure around that first instinctive pose, and the strange double stance, both feet flat, the body somehow caught between two steps at once, became the means by which a static sculpture conveys continuous motion. The eye cannot resolve the pose into a single instant, and so it reads it as walking, as the unstoppable advance of the preacher into the world.

Saint John the Baptist Preaching was exhibited at the Salon and was received with serious attention; it was understood at once as a major work, and it confirmed, beyond the lingering doubts of the surmoulage affair, that Rodin was a sculptor of the first importance. Out of the same campaign of work came a related figure that would have a long and remarkable afterlife of its own. In the course of developing the Baptist, Rodin had modeled a study of the lower body, a striding torso and legs without head or arms, and this fragment, far from being discarded as a mere preparatory exercise, was eventually recognized by Rodin as a complete and powerful work in its own right. Decades later he had it enlarged to monumental scale and exhibited it, headless and armless, under the title The Walking Man. It is one of the boldest of all his statements of the fragment as a finished form: a sculpture that has thrown away the head, the seat of identity and thought, and the arms, the instruments of action, and kept only the pure fact of the body in motion, and that loses nothing, expresses everything, by the subtraction. The road from The Man with the Broken Nose ran straight through The Walking Man.

By the start of the 1880s, then, Rodin's long obscurity was decisively over. He had been vindicated in the surmoulage affair; the state had bought his work; Saint John the Baptist had established his standing; the officials and critics of Paris knew and debated his name. He returned permanently to Paris, set up his studio there, and entered, at last, the productive maturity that the previous twenty years had so long delayed. He began to receive portrait commissions and to be talked of as one of the coming forces of French sculpture. And then, in 1880, the state placed in his hands a commission that would occupy him for the rest of his life, that he would never finish, and that would become the inexhaustible quarry from which a large part of his greatest work was cut. The state asked Auguste Rodin to make a door.

The Gates of Hell: the Commission of a Lifetime

In 1880 the French government, through the official then responsible for the fine arts, commissioned Rodin to design and execute a monumental decorative portal, a great pair of bronze doors, for a new public building that was being planned in Paris, a Museum of Decorative Arts. The commission was a sign of how far and how fast Rodin's standing had risen in the wake of his vindication: only a year or two after the surmoulage scandal, the state was entrusting him with a major architectural project and providing him, as part of the arrangement, with a studio in a government building, the Dépôt des Marbres, where the nation stored its marble. Rodin was to be paid for the work and given the means to carry it out. He was nearly forty. It was the great opportunity of his life, and he seized it with an ambition that immediately overflowed every limit the commission had set.

Rodin chose as his subject the Inferno, the first part of the Divine Comedy, the medieval Italian poet Dante Alighieri's vision of Hell. The doors would be called The Gates of Hell. Dante's poem, with its descending circles crowded with the damned, its endless catalogue of human sin, suffering, and passion, gave Rodin a framework capacious enough to hold everything he wanted to say about the human condition, and he began to populate the great door with figures: lovers, sinners, despairing souls, twisting and falling and clinging bodies, nearly two hundred of them in the end, swarming across the panels and the framing and the crowning lintel in a vast, turbulent, unprecedented composition. He drew also on the Renaissance precedent of Lorenzo Ghiberti's celebrated bronze doors for the Baptistery in Florence, but where Ghiberti's panels were serene, ordered narrative reliefs, Rodin's door became something altogether different, a churning, almost chaotic field of bodies in every condition of desire and torment, a single immense image of human life as suffering, struggle, and longing.

The Gates of Hell consumed Rodin, in one way or another, for the next thirty-seven years, until his death. He never finished it. The Museum of Decorative Arts for which the doors were intended was delayed, redesigned, and ultimately never built in the form originally planned, so the practical occasion for the commission gradually evaporated; the deadline dissolved; the doors were never installed in any building during Rodin's lifetime, never cast in bronze while he lived, never declared by him to be complete. And yet the absence of a deadline, which might have defeated a lesser artist, liberated Rodin. Released from the obligation to finish, he was free to use the Gates as a permanent laboratory, a vast work in progress to which he returned again and again across the decades, adding figures, removing figures, rearranging the whole, testing every idea he had about the human body and human feeling against its inexhaustible surface.

The most consequential thing about The Gates of Hell, for the history of art, is what Rodin did with the figures he modeled for it. He came to see each of the hundreds of small figures swarming over the door as a potential independent work. A figure conceived as one writhing soul among the damned could be lifted out of the crowd, isolated, studied on its own, and then enlarged, sometimes to monumental size, into a freestanding sculpture with its own title and its own independent existence. The Gates became, in this way, the matrix, the generative source, of a remarkable proportion of Rodin's most famous individual sculptures. The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shades, Ugolino and His Sons, Fugit Amor, The Prodigal Son, and many more all began as elements of the great door before being drawn out of it to lead lives of their own. Rodin's habit of treating his own work as raw material, of breaking down and recombining and re-scaling his figures, found in the Gates its supreme field of operation.

The Gates of Hell, as the visitor sees it today in bronze, was cast only after Rodin's death, from the plaster he left, and its place in his career is therefore peculiar and profound. It is at once his most ambitious single work and a work he never completed; the great unfinished cathedral of his imagination; the project against which he measured himself for almost four decades; and the source from which a whole population of independent masterpieces was born. To understand Rodin's mature achievement is to understand that much of it grew, directly, out of this one inexhaustible commission, this door to Hell that opened, in the event, onto the whole of modern sculpture. And no figure that emerged from it would travel farther into the imagination of the world than the brooding, seated man Rodin first conceived as the poet Dante, looking down from the top of the Gates upon the torments he had created.

The Thinker, the Kiss, and the Progeny of the Gates

The most famous sculpture in the world to emerge from The Gates of Hell, and arguably the most famous sculpture of the modern age, is The Thinker. Rodin conceived it as part of the great door, a single seated male figure placed at the center of the top of the Gates, above the panels of the damned, leaning forward with his chin resting on his hand, gazing down at the turbulent human suffering spread out below. In its original conception this figure was the poet Dante himself, the author of the Inferno, contemplating the world of his own creation; Rodin's early name for it was simply The Poet. But the figure he modeled transcended that specific identity almost at once. It was not a portrait of Dante in medieval robes; it was a powerful naked man, every muscle tensed, the whole body gathered and concentrated into the single act of thought, and it read, universally and immediately, as something larger than any one poet. It read as the image of human thought itself, of the mind straining against the weight of existence.

Rodin recognized what he had made, and in the years around the turn of the century he had The Thinker enlarged from its modest original size to a monumental scale and exhibited as an independent work. It was an immense success. In 1906 a large bronze cast of The Thinker was placed on public view in front of the Panthéon in Paris, installed there through a public subscription raised by Rodin's admirers, an honor that placed the work, and its maker, at the symbolic center of French national culture. The Thinker became, and has remained, one of the most reproduced and most recognized images in all of art, cast in bronze editions, copied, parodied, set up outside museums and universities and public buildings across the world, a universal shorthand for contemplation, philosophy, and the life of the mind. Few works of sculpture have ever escaped so completely into the general imagination of humanity. And it began as one figure among hundreds, a poet looking down at Hell, on a door that was never finished.

The Kiss had a similar origin and a similar destiny. It too was conceived for The Gates of Hell, and it too depicts a couple drawn from Dante's Inferno: Paolo and Francesca, the adulterous lovers of the poem, who fall in love while reading together of Lancelot and Guinevere and are murdered and damned for their passion. Rodin modeled them at the moment of their first embrace, a man and a woman, both nude, caught in a kiss of complete tenderness and absorption, the bodies modeled with a sensuous truth and warmth that few sculptors had ever achieved in marble. But Rodin came to feel that the group did not belong on the Gates after all. The Kiss was too happy, too serene, too purely beautiful for the door of the damned; its mood of fulfilled and untroubled love clashed with the surrounding atmosphere of torment. So he removed it from the project and let it stand on its own, and as an independent work, especially in its luminous marble versions, The Kiss became one of the best-loved sculptures of the age, an icon of romantic and erotic love, exhibited and reproduced and admired wherever Rodin's name was known.

The fate of The Kiss reveals something essential about Rodin's later attitude to it, and to popular acclaim in general. As his art grew more austere and more radical, he became somewhat impatient with The Kiss, regarding it as comparatively conventional, a beautiful but relatively safe and academic piece, lacking the daring of his more experimental work. The public adored it precisely because it was accessible and gorgeous; Rodin, increasingly, was interested in things the public found harder. The tension between Rodin the maker of universally beloved icons, The Kiss, The Thinker, and Rodin the radical experimenter who pushed sculpture toward fragmentation and abstraction runs through the whole of his maturity, and it would come to a head, painfully and magnificently, in the great battle over the Monument to Balzac.

The Gates of Hell went on generating works throughout Rodin's life. The Three Shades, a group of three identical male figures, the same figure cast three times and combined, who stood at the very summit of the door pointing down into Hell, became an independent monumental sculpture. Ugolino and His Sons, the starving medieval count of Dante's poem crawling among his dying children, was drawn out and enlarged. Fugit Amor, the despairing entwined lovers forever pulled apart, Eve, Adam, The Prodigal Son, The Falling Man, the Crouching Woman, figure after figure stepped out of the great door to lead an independent existence. No other work in the history of sculpture has been so fertile. The Gates of Hell was Rodin's unfinished masterpiece and, at the same time, the womb of a whole world of masterpieces, and while he labored over it across the decades he was also, in the same years, fighting and winning and losing the great public battles of his career, beginning with the monument to six medieval citizens of a besieged French port.

The Burghers of Calais

In 1884 the municipality of the northern French port city of Calais resolved to erect a monument commemorating an event from its medieval past, and the commission was awarded to Auguste Rodin. The result, completed in 1889, was The Burghers of Calais, one of the supreme achievements of nineteenth-century sculpture and one of the most radical public monuments ever made. To understand why it was radical, it is necessary to understand both the story it told and the way every other sculptor of the age would have told it.

The story belonged to the Hundred Years' War between England and France. In 1346 and 1347 the English king Edward III laid siege to Calais, and the city, after holding out for nearly a year, was starved into the point of surrender. Edward offered terms of a particular cruelty: he would spare the population if six of the city's leading citizens, its most prominent burghers, would come out to him bareheaded and barefoot, with ropes already knotted around their necks, carrying the keys of the city and the castle, and offer themselves to be executed in the place of everyone else. The chronicler Jean Froissart recorded what followed. The wealthiest citizen of Calais, a man named Eustache de Saint-Pierre, rose first and volunteered to be one of the six; five others, shamed and inspired, rose after him. The six men stripped to their shirts, put the ropes around their own necks, and walked out of the starving city to what they believed was their death. In the event they were spared, by the intercession, the chroniclers say, of the English queen, but they did not know, as they walked out, that they would be spared. They walked out expecting to die.

Every instinct of nineteenth-century public sculpture would have turned this story into an image of triumphant heroism. The convention of the civic monument demanded a single noble protagonist, idealized, raised high on a pedestal above the heads of the crowd, striking a confident and exemplary attitude, the very picture of patriotic virtue calmly embraced. The city of Calais, commissioning a monument to its medieval heroes, expected something of that kind, very likely a single grand figure of Eustache de Saint-Pierre lifted up on a column. Rodin gave them something else entirely, and the something else is what makes The Burghers of Calais a masterpiece.

Rodin refused the single hero. He modeled all six of the burghers, and he modeled them not as triumphant patriots but as six individual human beings in the grip of the most extreme experience a person can face: the deliberate, voluntary walk toward death. He studied each man as a separate psychological case, a separate way of confronting the unbearable. One strides forward with grim, exhausted resolve; one walks with his head bowed in despair; one presses his hands to the sides of his head in a gesture of anguish; one carries the great key with a heavy, dragging gravity; one seems almost to recoil, to hesitate, his whole body expressing the natural human terror that courage must overcome. The heroism Rodin showed was not the heroism of men who feel no fear. It was the far greater and far truer heroism of men who feel fear completely, who are crushed by it, and who go forward anyway. He made a monument not to confident virtue but to the cost of virtue, to what it actually feels like, in the body and the face, to lay down one's life.

Rodin also made a radical decision about how the monument should be placed, and the decision was of a piece with everything else. He did not want The Burghers of Calais raised on a tall pedestal, set apart and above, in the conventional manner that turned public statues into remote and idealized presences. He wanted the six figures placed on the ground, or nearly on the ground, at the level of the living citizens of Calais, so that an ordinary passerby would meet the burghers face to face, would walk among them, would encounter them as a crowd of real and suffering men rather than as distant icons on a column. This was an extraordinary idea for a public monument in 1889, and it was decades ahead of its time; it abolished the whole rhetoric of elevation, the visual language by which monuments had always asserted the superiority of the commemorated over the commemorating. The city authorities resisted, and for a long time the monument was in fact displayed on a conventional pedestal, against Rodin's wishes. Only much later was his original intention substantially honored, and the figures set low, where the public could come close. Casts of the group now stand in cities around the world, and the best of them allow exactly the encounter Rodin wanted: the visitor walking, at eye level, into the company of six men on the worst morning of their lives.

The Burghers of Calais demonstrated, more completely than any single earlier work, what Rodin had brought to sculpture. He had taken the most public and most conventional of forms, the civic memorial, and filled it with private, individual, psychological truth. He had refused idealization, refused the pedestal, refused the single hero, and insisted that the real subject of a monument to courage must be the human reality of fear. The work was admired, debated, and slowly recognized as a landmark, and it stands today as one of the small number of nineteenth-century monuments that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have continued to regard as great. But even as Rodin labored over the burghers through the middle 1880s, his life had been entered by a person who would shape his art and shadow his conscience for the rest of his days: a young sculptor of fierce and original genius named Camille Claudel.

Camille Claudel

Camille Claudel came into Rodin's studio in the early 1880s as a pupil and an assistant, and she was, from the beginning, something far more than an ordinary student. Born in 1864, the sister of the future poet and diplomat Paul Claudel, she was a young woman of formidable artistic gifts, a sculptor of genuine and independent genius who had been modeling with extraordinary skill since adolescence and who had sought out Rodin because he was the greatest sculptor in France and she intended to learn from the best. She was beautiful, brilliant, proud, and uncompromising, and she was roughly twenty-four years younger than the man whose studio she entered. Within a short time she had become indispensable to Rodin in three distinct and inextricable roles, and the entanglement of those roles is the tragedy of her life. She was his student and his trusted studio assistant, working on his major commissions; she was his model, her face and body entering his sculpture; and she became, for some fifteen years, his lover.

As a collaborator Claudel was no mere pair of hands. She worked on Rodin's important projects of the 1880s and 1890s, and her contribution was real and substantial; contemporaries understood that she was carving and modeling at the highest level, and her own sensibility entered the shared work of the studio. As a model she inspired some of Rodin's most beautiful and most personal sculptures of the period; the passion of those years modeled the tenderness and the eroticism of much of his finest work. And as an artist in her own right she was producing sculpture of astonishing power, work that stands comparison with Rodin's own and that, in its emotional intensity and its formal daring, was sometimes ahead of his. The Waltz, a couple turning in the abandon of a dance; The Mature Age, a devastating allegorical group; The Wave; Sakuntala; the small genre scenes she called her sketches from nature: these are the works of a major sculptor, and the tragedy of Camille Claudel is in part the tragedy of how completely that fact was obscured, in her own lifetime, by her relation to Rodin.

The relationship between Rodin and Claudel was passionate and, on both sides, creatively charged, but it was fatally unequal, and the inequality was not only one of age and fame. It was that Rodin would not leave Rose Beuret. Through all the years of his love for Camille Claudel, Rodin remained bound to the loyal, uneducated companion of his obscure years, the mother of his son, the woman who had waited through the poverty and would go on waiting. He would not break with Rose, and he would not give Claudel the exclusive commitment, the marriage, the public standing as the partner of the great man, that she increasingly demanded and that her pride and her love required. Claudel was caught in an impossible position: the lover who was never first, the artist whose work the world insisted on reading as a derivative of her teacher's, the woman whose youth and gifts were being spent in the orbit of a man who would not finally choose her. By the early and middle 1890s the relationship was breaking under the strain, and around 1898 it ended.

For Camille Claudel the ending was the beginning of a long descent. She tried to build an independent career as a sculptor, and for a time she produced remarkable work in her own studio, but she was poor, she was a woman in a profession that gave women almost no room, and she was increasingly convinced, with a conviction that hardened into a fixed and tormenting delusion, that Rodin was persecuting her, conspiring against her, stealing her ideas, blocking her success. Her mental health deteriorated over the following years into what would now be recognized as a serious psychiatric illness. She withdrew, destroyed some of her own work, lived in isolation and squalor. In 1913, shortly after the death of her father, who had been her chief protector within the family, her mother and brother had her committed to a psychiatric asylum. She was forty-eight years old. She remained confined, in one institution and then another, for the last thirty years of her life, until her death in 1943, and although there is evidence that her condition stabilized and that doctors at times indicated she might be released, her family kept her institutionalized. She made no more sculpture. She died in the asylum, during the Second World War, and was buried in a communal grave.

The story of Camille Claudel casts a long and complicated shadow across Rodin's biography, and it should not be simplified in either direction. Rodin did not cause her mental illness, which had its own deep roots, and the decision to commit her and, above all, to keep her committed for three decades was made by her family, not by him. But it is also true that the years with Rodin, the unequal love, the subordination of her career to his, the agony of being the second woman, were part of what broke her, and that Rodin, who could have married her and did not, who allowed the world to see her as his pupil rather than his peer, bears a real share of the moral weight. He did not abandon her financially in a simple sense; there is evidence he tried at points, discreetly, to help her and to promote her work. But he had what he wanted, his art, his rising fame, the patient Rose, and she lost everything, and the asymmetry of those two fates is not erased by good intentions. Camille Claudel is now recognized as one of the major sculptors of her age, and the recognition, which came almost entirely after her death, is itself a verdict on how much the arrangement of her life had cost her.

The Monument to Victor Hugo

While the affair with Claudel ran its course and The Gates of Hell stood perpetually unfinished in his studio, Rodin in the late 1880s and the 1890s took on a series of monumental public commissions, and two of them in particular, the monuments to two giants of French literature, drew him into the deepest controversies of his career. The first was a commission to commemorate Victor Hugo, the novelist and poet who, at his death in 1885, had been mourned as the supreme literary genius of France and very nearly as a secular saint of the Republic.

Rodin received a commission, around 1889, for a monument to Hugo intended for the Panthéon, the great Paris building that serves as the resting place and shrine of the heroes of the French nation. The commission was an honor of the first order, but it placed Rodin in the same conflict that had defined his whole career: the conflict between his own conception of sculpture and the expectations of the official patron. The Panthéon wanted, in effect, a conventional commemorative statue, a dignified standing figure of the great man, legible, decorous, suited to the solemn architectural setting. Rodin wanted to make something more ambitious and more strange: he conceived Hugo not as a clothed and standing public man but as a nude, seated figure, the poet in exile on the rocky coast where he had spent his years of political banishment, attended by allegorical female figures, muses or spirits of inspiration, an image of the creative genius rather than a portrait of the official celebrity.

The design Rodin developed did not satisfy the authorities responsible for the Panthéon, and the project there foundered; the seated nude Hugo was judged unsuitable for the building. Rodin's design, in one form, was eventually realized and placed elsewhere, and he continued for years to work and rework the Hugo subject, producing multiple versions, studies, and variants, the monument splitting, in his hands, into a whole family of related works in his characteristic manner. The Victor Hugo commission, in the end, was a partial frustration: a great subject, years of labor, a conception of real power, and an official outcome that fell well short of what Rodin had envisioned. But the Hugo affair was only the prelude. The truly epic collision between Rodin and the official world, the one that became a cause célèbre of French cultural life and that posterity has come to regard as the moment modern sculpture announced itself, gathered around another, even greater, literary name: that of the novelist Honoré de Balzac.

The Monument to Balzac and the Great Refusal

In 1891 the Société des Gens de Lettres, the official society of French men of letters, commissioned Auguste Rodin to create a monument to Honoré de Balzac, the colossal novelist whose vast cycle of novels, the Human Comedy, had mapped the whole of French society and who had died, exhausted by his own titanic labors, in 1850. The driving force behind the choice of Rodin was the writer Émile Zola, then president of the society, who admired Rodin and pushed the commission through. It was a prestigious assignment and it came with a deadline. Rodin accepted, and then proceeded to spend the next seven years on it, missing every deadline, exhausting the patience of his patrons, and producing, at the end of that long ordeal, one of the most revolutionary sculptures ever made.

Rodin approached the Balzac commission with an intensity of research that went far beyond anything the society can have imagined. He was not interested in producing a competent likeness of a famous dead author. He wanted to seize and embody the essence of Balzac, the creative force of the man, the genius itself, and he pursued that essence with a kind of obsessive thoroughness. He read Balzac's novels and the accounts of those who had known him. He traveled to the region of Touraine, where Balzac had been born, and studied the physical type of the local people, searching for living faces that might carry the family resemblance. He gathered every portrait, every description, every scrap of evidence about Balzac's heavy, powerful body and large head. He even, famously, had a tailor make a suit of clothes cut to Balzac's recorded measurements, so that he could study the actual bulk and proportion of the man. And he modeled study after study after study: nude studies of the gross, powerful body; studies of the massive head; Balzac standing, Balzac with his arms folded, Balzac in every attitude, dozens of variants accumulating across the seven years.

The final conception that emerged from this immense labor was unlike any public monument that had ever been made. Rodin discarded the legible, anecdotal, portrait approach entirely. He showed Balzac standing, the great head thrown back, and he wrapped the entire body, from the neck to the ground, in the long, loose dressing gown that the novelist was said to have worn during his nocturnal labors. But Rodin modeled that robe as a single enveloping mass, a rough, monolithic, almost shapeless column of drapery out of which the head emerges like a force of nature, like a crag, like a thing erupting. The body, in the ordinary sense, vanishes; the limbs are not described; the figure becomes a near-abstract upright mass crowned by a head of overwhelming power. It is a monument not to Balzac's appearance but to Balzac's genius, an image of creative energy itself, and it pushed sculpture closer to abstraction than any serious artist had yet dared to take it.

When Rodin exhibited the great plaster of the Balzac monument at the Salon of 1898, it provoked an uproar. To eyes trained on conventional public statuary the figure was incomprehensible and offensive; it was mocked as a shapeless lump, a sack, a snowman, a menhir, a block of nothing crowned by a head, the product, the cruder critics implied, of a sculptor who had either lost his powers or was laughing at the public. The Société des Gens de Lettres, the commissioning body, formally rejected the work. It refused to accept Rodin's Balzac, refused to have it cast and erected, and the rejection became one of the great public scandals of the French cultural year, fought out in the newspapers, dividing the artistic and literary world into furious camps. The controversy was, moreover, entangled with the larger convulsion then tearing France apart, the Dreyfus affair, in which Zola, Rodin's original champion, was a central and embattled figure; the lines of cultural and political loyalty were tense and bitter, and the Balzac quarrel was caught up in that wider storm.

A group of Rodin's supporters, including many of the most advanced writers and artists of the day, rallied to the work and raised money to have it cast and placed by public subscription. But Rodin, wounded and proud, brought the affair to an end himself. He declined the subscription, took the rejected plaster Balzac back, and carried it home to his property at Meudon, outside Paris, where he set it up in the garden. There it remained for the rest of his life. The Monument to Balzac was not cast in bronze and placed in public, in Paris, until 1939, more than twenty years after Rodin's death and more than forty years after the Salon that had ridiculed it. When it was finally erected, on a Paris boulevard, the verdict of history had completely reversed the verdict of 1898. The work that the Société des Gens de Lettres had rejected as a formless joke was by then widely understood for what it was: a turning point, the moment when sculpture broke free of description and became, like the abstract and expressive art of the new century, a vehicle for pure form and pure force. Rodin himself regarded the Balzac as the summation of his life's work, the boldest and the most important thing he had ever made, and posterity has agreed. It is routinely described as the first truly modern sculpture, the door through which the twentieth century walked.

The rejection of the Balzac, painful as it was, did Rodin no lasting damage, because by 1898 his position was simply too strong to be shaken by the disapproval of a literary society. The very next phase of his career would carry him to a height of fame that no sculptor had ever occupied, an international celebrity built on a single, audacious gesture in the year 1900. But before following Rodin to that triumph, it is worth going inside his studio, to look at how, in practical terms, this extraordinary body of work was actually made, because Rodin's methods of working were as original, and as influential, as any of his individual sculptures.

Inside the Studio: Rodin's Method of Work

Auguste Rodin worked in clay and in plaster. This simple fact is the key to understanding his entire practice, and it sets him apart from the popular image of the sculptor as a solitary figure chipping a statue out of a marble block. Rodin very rarely touched marble himself, and after his early years he rarely cast his own bronzes. What Rodin did, with his own hands, was model: he built up his figures in soft clay, working the material with his fingers and simple tools, and then had those clay originals cast into plaster, which gave him a durable, white, permanent record of the modeled form. The clay and the plaster were where his creation happened. Marble and bronze, the materials in which the public finally saw the works, were, for Rodin, means of reproduction and translation, and the labor of producing them was largely carried out by others.

This was not laziness or fraud; it was the normal practice of an ambitious nineteenth-century sculpture studio, and Rodin organized his on a large scale. He employed a substantial workshop of skilled assistants, the carvers known in French as praticiens, whose job was to translate his plaster models into finished marble, enlarging or reducing them and cutting the stone under his direction and to his standard. He employed founders to cast his works in bronze. He employed enlargers who could take a small modeled figure and reproduce it accurately at monumental scale, and reducers who could do the reverse. Over the years a remarkable number of gifted younger sculptors passed through Rodin's studio as assistants, among them Antoine Bourdelle, Charles Despiau, and François Pompon, men who went on to significant careers of their own; for a brief and famous period the young Romanian sculptor Constantin Brâncu?i worked there too, before leaving with the celebrated remark that nothing grows in the shade of great trees. The Rodin studio was, in short, a substantial enterprise, and the works that bear Rodin's name were in a real sense the products of a collaborative system that he directed.

What made the system Rodin's, and what made it revolutionary, was the way he treated his own modeled figures once they existed in plaster. A plaster cast can be reproduced; from one plaster original any number of further plasters can be drawn. Rodin grasped, and exploited more fully than anyone before him, the creative possibilities of this fact. His plaster figures became, for him, a permanent vocabulary, a stock of forms that he could use and reuse, combine and recombine, indefinitely. He could take a single figure and repeat it, as he did with the three identical Shades. He could take a figure made for one work and assign it a new role and a new title in another. He could enlarge a small study into a monument, as with The Walking Man, or reduce a large figure to an intimate scale. He could take a figure modeled for The Gates of Hell and stand it alone in the world. The boundaries between his works were permeable; a sculpture was never simply finished and closed but remained, potentially, raw material for the next idea.

The most radical extension of this method was the practice of assemblage. Rodin would combine separately modeled elements, a figure and an antique vase, a body and a fragment of another body, a sculpture and an unrelated object, into new and unexpected wholes, juxtapositions that no traditional conception of the unified statue would have permitted. He would set a delicate modeled figure inside or against a rough block, or place small plaster figures into found containers, generating meaning out of the collision of parts. This habit of construction, of building sculpture by combining and recombining fragments and modules, looks directly forward to the assemblage and collage practices that would become central to the art of the twentieth century. Rodin, working in plaster in his crowded studio, was inventing one of the basic procedures of modern art.

Closely connected was Rodin's embrace of the fragment and the partial figure, an idea that had first appeared, half by accident, in The Man with the Broken Nose and that he developed across his career into a deliberate and central principle. Rodin came to believe that a fragment of the human body, a torso without head or limbs, a pair of hands, a single striding lower body, could be a complete and fully expressive work of art, that subtraction could intensify rather than diminish, that the part could say more than the whole. The headless, armless Walking Man is the great monument of this conviction. So is a small, exquisite work like the one he called The Cathedral, which consists simply of two right hands, modeled from two different people, brought together so that they almost touch, enclosing between them a charged and sacred-seeming space. To present such things, in the nineteenth century, as finished sculptures worthy of exhibition was a genuinely radical act, and it permanently expanded the available vocabulary of the art. After Rodin, the fragment was a form.

Rodin's surfaces were the final element of his method, and the most immediately visible. He refused the smooth, sealed, impersonal finish that the academy demanded. He left his surfaces alive: rough, irregular, marked with the evidence of the making, the impressions of his fingers and tools preserved in the bronze, the modeling left frankly open. He understood that a sculpture is seen by light, that light falls across a surface and is caught by every ridge and lost in every hollow, and he modeled his surfaces precisely so that light would flicker and pool and move across them, giving the bronze a quality of vibration, of breathing, of life. The academic finish killed that movement; Rodin's deliberate roughness released it. Even his marbles, carved by his praticiens, often retain passages where the figure seems to rise out of, and remain partly embedded in, the rough unworked block, the polished body emerging from the raw stone, a contrast that Rodin loved and that consciously recalled the unfinished Slaves of Michelangelo he had studied, decades before, in Italy. Everything in Rodin's method, the modeling, the plaster vocabulary, the assemblage, the fragment, the living surface, served a single end: to make sculpture that was not a frozen ideal but a thing that seemed to move, to feel, and to be alive.

The Drawings and Watercolors

Sculpture was the center of Rodin's life, but it was not the whole of his art, and any account of his achievement that ignores his drawings misses something essential. Rodin drew constantly, from boyhood, when drawing had been the one refuge of a nearsighted child, to old age, and over his lifetime he produced thousands upon thousands of works on paper. The drawings fall, broadly, into two great phases, and the difference between them is itself a measure of how far Rodin traveled as an artist.

The drawings of his earlier years, and those associated with The Gates of Hell, are dark, dense, and dramatic, deeply marked by the brooding spirit of Dante and by the example of Michelangelo. Worked in ink and wash, heavily shadowed, crowded with straining and falling bodies, they are studies in torment and energy, the graphic equivalent of the swarming damned of the great door. They show Rodin thinking on paper, working out the masses and movements of figures, exploring the human body as a vehicle of suffering and force. They are powerful, but they belong recognizably to the nineteenth century, to the tradition of the dramatic, literary, finished drawing.

The drawings of Rodin's later decades are something else entirely, and they are among the most astonishing things he ever made. In his maturity Rodin developed a method of drawing that was as radical, in its own field, as the partial figure was in sculpture. He had nude models, very often women, move freely and continuously about his studio, walking, stretching, crouching, lying down, adopting no fixed academic pose at all but simply living and moving in front of him. And Rodin drew them as they moved, his eyes fixed on the model and almost never on the paper, his pencil following the contour of the moving body in a single swift, continuous line, the hand a pure servant of the looking eye. He drew without correcting, without shading, without finishing, capturing the gesture, the pose, the fall of weight, the flash of movement, in a few seconds and a few lines. Then, frequently, he would lay in a quick, fluid wash of watercolor, a pale tint of warmth or shadow across the swift contour, and the drawing was done.

These late drawings have an extraordinary freshness and immediacy. They are frank, sensual, and entirely unembarrassed in their treatment of the body, especially the female body, and some of them were too frank for the taste of their time; the sensuality of Rodin's late graphic work, like the sensuality of much of his sculpture, drew accusations of indecency from the more easily scandalized of his contemporaries. But what they capture, beyond their eroticism, is life caught on the wing, the human body not posed and idealized but observed in the unrepeatable instant of real movement. They were, in their way, the purest expression of the lesson Lecoq de Boisbaudran had planted in the boy at the Petite École half a century before: the lesson that art must seize the living truth, that the connection between the seeing eye and the moving hand must be direct, instantaneous, and unbroken. Rodin valued these drawings highly, exhibited them, and gathered great numbers of them, and today they are recognized as a major independent achievement, the work of one of the supreme draftsmen of the modern era, and not merely as the by-product of a sculptor's practice.

The Pavilion of 1900 and Worldwide Fame

In the year 1900 the city of Paris hosted a vast Exposition Universelle, a World's Fair of the kind that the great cities of the age staged to display the achievements of industry, science, and culture to enormous international crowds. For an artist, the Exposition was both an opportunity and a problem: the official art exhibitions associated with such fairs were crowded, miscellaneous, and easy to be lost in. Rodin, now nearing sixty, made a bold and characteristically independent decision. Rather than show a few works in the official galleries, he would mount, at his own initiative and his own financial risk, a complete one-man retrospective of his life's work, in a pavilion of his own, on his own terms.

He had a pavilion built at the Place de l'Alma in Paris, near the Exposition grounds, and into it he gathered a great body of his work, well over a hundred and fifty sculptures, including plasters, marbles, and bronzes, drawings, and the unfinished Gates of Hell itself. It was the first time the public could see the full sweep of Rodin's achievement assembled in one place, the whole development from the early works through the great public monuments to the radical recent experiments. The financial gamble was real; mounting such an exhibition was expensive, and there was no guarantee the public would come. But the gamble succeeded beyond anything Rodin could have hoped. The Pavilion of 1900 was a triumph. Visitors came in great numbers, including artists, critics, collectors, and dignitaries from across Europe and from the United States, and they went away convinced that they had seen the work of the greatest living sculptor in the world.

The 1900 pavilion transformed Rodin's situation completely and permanently. Before it he was a famous and controversial French artist; after it he was an international institution, the most celebrated sculptor on earth, a figure of world reputation. The consequences were immediate and practical. Commissions poured in. Collectors competed for his work. The portrait bust, in particular, became a major part of his late practice, as the eminent of the age, statesmen, writers, artists, society figures from many countries, sought to be modeled by Rodin; among the famous heads he made in his later years were those of the writer George Bernard Shaw, the composer Gustav Mahler, and other leading figures of the time. His sculptures were bought by museums in Europe and especially in the United States, where American collectors and institutions became some of his most important patrons; significant collections of his work were assembled across the Atlantic, and his fame in the English-speaking world grew enormous. He received official honors in France and abroad, including, eventually, an honorary degree from the ancient University of Oxford in England. The poor boy rejected three times by the École des Beaux-Arts had become, by the first decade of the new century, the most honored artist of his generation, and a wealthy man.

Wealth and fame changed the texture of Rodin's life. He acquired property; he employed a large staff; he moved in the highest social and intellectual circles; he was sought out, visited, interviewed, photographed, and revered. He had become a monument himself, a destination, a sage whom younger artists and admiring writers made pilgrimages to see. And yet the work did not stop and did not soften. Through the years of his celebrity Rodin went on modeling, went on drawing, went on returning to the eternal unfinished Gates, went on pursuing the same truth he had pursued in the cold stable forty years before. The late years brought him, along with fame and money, a remarkable household of admirers and assistants, and one of them, for a brief and significant period, was a young poet from Prague who would become one of the greatest writers of the century.

Rilke, the Hôtel Biron, and the Late Years

In the first years of the twentieth century a young German-language poet named Rainer Maria Rilke, born in Prague, came to Paris with the intention of writing a study of Rodin. Rilke was at that point near the start of his own great career, and the encounter with Rodin marked him for life. He published a sensitive and penetrating monograph on the sculptor, and for a period in 1905 and 1906 he served as Rodin's private secretary, living close to the old master, managing his correspondence, and observing his way of working and his way of being with the intense attention of one major artist studying another. Rilke revered Rodin, and from him he absorbed a lesson that reshaped his own poetry: the lesson of patient, humble, relentless work, of looking at the object until its truth surrendered itself, of treating art not as the expression of fine feelings but as a daily craft and discipline. The relationship was not without friction; Rodin abruptly dismissed Rilke in 1906 after a misunderstanding over correspondence, and the poet was wounded. But the two men were later reconciled, and Rilke's writings on Rodin remain among the most illuminating things ever written about him, the testimony of a worshipful but clear-eyed witness to the daily reality of Rodin's genius.

It was Rilke, by most accounts, who first drew Rodin's attention to the building with which the last decade of his life, and his entire posthumous legacy, would be bound up: the Hôtel Biron. The Hôtel Biron was a magnificent eighteenth-century mansion in the rue de Varenne in Paris, a great house with large rooms and a wild, overgrown garden, which by the early twentieth century had passed into the hands of the state and was being let out, room by room, to artists and writers as studio and living space. A whole community of creative tenants gathered there in those years; the painter Henri Matisse, the writer Jean Cocteau, the dancer Isadora Duncan, and Rilke himself were among those associated with the house. Rodin began renting space in the Hôtel Biron around 1908, and he fell in love with it, with its grand decayed rooms, its light, its romantic garden, and he gradually filled it with his sculptures, his plaster casts, and the large personal collection of art and antiquities he had assembled over the years of his prosperity.

Then the state, which owned the Hôtel Biron, decided to reclaim and dispose of the building, and the tenants were given notice to leave. For Rodin, by now an old man who had made the house the setting of his late life and work, the threat of losing it prompted one of the most consequential decisions of his career, a decision that turned a private attachment into a permanent public legacy. Rodin proposed to the French state a remarkable bargain. He would give to the nation his entire artistic estate: all of his own sculptures, the plaster models from which any future casts could be made, his vast holdings of drawings, and his important personal collection of art, which included antiquities and paintings by major modern masters. In exchange, he asked only that the state preserve the Hôtel Biron and turn it into a museum dedicated permanently to his work. It was an act of extraordinary generosity, and it was also an act of profound foresight, a deliberate effort by Rodin to control and secure the survival and the presentation of his life's achievement.

The proposal was debated, and it was not entirely uncontroversial; there were those who questioned the value or the propriety of the arrangement. But the donation was accepted. In a series of formal acts of gift completed in 1916, near the end of Rodin's life, the French state agreed to receive his bequest and to establish the museum he had asked for. The Musée Rodin, housed in the Hôtel Biron, became the institution that would hold and display his work for posterity, and it remains, to this day, one of the great single-artist museums of the world, the place where the unfinished Gates of Hell, The Thinker, The Burghers of Calais, The Kiss, the Balzac, the drawings, and the long sequence of his life's work can be seen together. By securing it, in his last years and during the catastrophe of a world war, Rodin ensured that the obscurity which had swallowed his first forty years would never reach forward to swallow his memory.

Rose Beuret, Marriage, and the Final Year

The last years of Auguste Rodin's life were shadowed by age, by failing health, and by the gigantic catastrophe of the First World War, which broke over Europe in 1914 and turned the triumphant world of his late fame into a landscape of mass death. Rodin was in his middle seventies when the war began. His health was declining; he suffered the effects of a stroke, and his great vitality, the engine of all those decades of ceaseless work, was at last beginning to fail him. He and Rose Beuret, who had now been together for more than half a century, withdrew largely to their home at Meudon, the property on the heights above the Seine just outside Paris, the Villa des Brillants, where the rejected plaster Balzac stood in the garden.

Rose Beuret had been at Rodin's side since 1864. She had shared the poverty of the stable studio, had borne and largely raised their son, had endured Rodin's long absorption in his work and his infidelities, the years of Camille Claudel, the procession of models and admiring women, the American duchess who had been his companion for a stretch of the celebrity years. Through all of it Rose had remained: loyal, uncomplaining in any way the record preserves, the fixed point of Rodin's domestic life across fifty-three years. She had never been his wife. Now, at the very end, in the cold and the grief and the diminishment of the war winters, Rodin at last made her one. On the twenty-ninth of January 1917 Auguste Rodin and Rose Beuret were married. He was seventy-six years old; she was in her seventies; they had been together since the year of The Man with the Broken Nose.

The marriage lasted just over two weeks. Rose Beuret, worn out and ill, died on the sixteenth of February 1917, sixteen days after the wedding that had finally, after more than five decades, made her the wife of the man she had served and loved since her youth. The timing is almost unbearably poignant, and it has become one of the most frequently told episodes of Rodin's biography, the lifelong companion granted the name of wife only in time to die with it. Whatever judgment one passes on Rodin's treatment of Rose across the long years, and the judgment cannot be wholly kind, the deathbed marriage stands as a final, belated acknowledgment of what she had been to him, and her death left the old sculptor, himself within months of his own end, alone.

Auguste Rodin survived his wife by only nine months. His health, already broken, declined steadily through the year 1917. France was in the depths of the war; fuel and comfort were scarce; the villa at Meudon was cold. In that cold house, on the seventeenth of November 1917, five days after his seventy-seventh birthday, Auguste Rodin died. The cause was given as an illness of the chest, a congestion or influenza against which his exhausted body had no defense. The man who had remade the art of sculpture, who had been rejected by every official body of his youth and honored by every academy of his age, died quietly in wartime, in the house above the river, and was buried at Meudon beside Rose. Over the two graves was placed a cast of The Thinker, so that the brooding figure that had begun its life as one soul among the damned on the unfinished Gates of Hell now keeps watch, permanently, over the bodies of the sculptor and the woman who had waited for him for fifty-three years.

The Musée Rodin and the Afterlife of the Work

Rodin died in 1917, in the middle of the war, and the museum he had arranged for could not open immediately. But the donation he had made to the French state held, and in 1919, two years after his death and the year after the war's end, the Musée Rodin opened to the public in the Hôtel Biron in Paris. The institution he had foreseen and secured came into being, and it has flourished ever since, drawing visitors from all over the world to the rooms and the garden where his sculpture is displayed. The opening of the Musée Rodin marks the true beginning of his posthumous existence, the moment his life's work passed, intact and protected, into the permanent keeping of the public.

Rodin's bequest carried within it a distinctive and consequential feature: it gave the French state, through the museum, the plaster models of his sculptures, and with them the right to continue producing bronze casts after his death. Because Rodin had worked by modeling originals that were then translated into bronze by professional founders, there was no fixed and final number of authentic bronzes of any given work; a bronze could legitimately be cast from the plaster whenever one was made, and Rodin himself, in his lifetime, had authorized bronzes to be produced in numbers over many years. The Musée Rodin inherited this practice. Under the authority of the museum, and later within the limits set by French law, which came to restrict the number of original casts of a sculpture to a defined edition, the museum has continued to produce posthumous bronze casts of Rodin's works from his original plasters. The bronze Gates of Hell that visitors see today, for instance, was cast after Rodin's death, since he never had the work cast in his lifetime.

This situation has made the question of authenticity in Rodin's work genuinely complex, and it is worth stating plainly, because it bears on how his sculpture is understood. A posthumous cast made by the Musée Rodin from Rodin's own plaster, within the legal edition, is regarded as an authentic, original Rodin bronze; the museum's casts are the standard against which everything else is measured. At the same time, Rodin's enormous fame, and the very fact that his works exist in multiple authorized casts, have made his sculpture a frequent target of forgery and unauthorized reproduction, and the market in Rodin bronzes has long been shadowed by fakes and by disputes over which casts are legitimate. None of this diminishes Rodin's achievement; it is, in a sense, simply the practical consequence of a working method, modeling and casting rather than direct carving, that was central to his art and to his conception of sculpture as something that need not exist in only one unique example. But it means that the afterlife of Rodin's work has been, and remains, an unusually active and contested one, supervised by the museum he created precisely so that his legacy would be protected.

Beyond the question of casts, the Musée Rodin has served the larger purpose its founder intended. It has kept his work together and visible; it has preserved the plasters, the drawings, the documents, and the personal collection; it has anchored the scholarly study of his art; and it has presented Rodin, generation after generation, to a public that has never stopped coming. The decision Rodin made in his last years, to give everything away in exchange for a museum, ranks among the wisest acts of his life. It guaranteed that the man whose first four decades had been spent in near-total obscurity would never again be lost to view.

The Legacy: the Father of Modern Sculpture

Auguste Rodin is called the father of modern sculpture, and the title, though it is the kind of grand phrase that invites suspicion, is in his case precisely earned. To see why, it is necessary to measure the distance between the art he received and the art he handed on. When Rodin began, in the 1850s and 1860s, serious European sculpture was, with few exceptions, an academic art governed by the ideals of neoclassicism: the human figure idealized and generalized, the surface smooth and impersonal, the pose calm and balanced, the emotional register restrained, the whole enterprise oriented toward a timeless and bloodless perfection inherited from a particular reading of the antique. Sculpture, more than painting, had become a conservative art, and a somewhat exhausted one. When Rodin finished, the situation was utterly different, and it had been changed, more than by any other single person, by him.

What Rodin restored to sculpture, first of all, was life. He insisted that the sculptured body should be true, particular, and alive, modeled from real observation, charged with movement and emotion, its surface left frankly expressive rather than sealed into dead smoothness. He brought back into the art the energy and the inner drama he had found in Michelangelo, and he wedded that energy to an absolutely modern attention to psychological truth. His figures think, suffer, desire, despair, and exult; they are not allegories or ideals but human beings, and the burghers of Calais, walking in fear toward their deaths, are the proof of how completely he had reunited public sculpture with private human reality.

Second, and more radically, Rodin opened the formal possibilities that the twentieth century would explore. The partial figure, the torso or fragment presented as a finished work, was effectively his invention as a deliberate artistic form, and from it descends a vast amount of modern sculpture, down through Brâncu?i and beyond. The practice of assemblage, of constructing sculpture by combining separately made elements and found objects, which he pursued in his plaster experiments, anticipates one of the defining procedures of modern art. His treatment of his own works as a fluid, reusable vocabulary of forms, to be enlarged, reduced, repeated, and recombined, broke the old notion of the sculpture as a single, fixed, unique, finished object. And the Monument to Balzac, that monolithic near-abstract column of force, pointed directly at the abstraction that sculpture would embrace within a generation of his death. It is for good reason that the Balzac is so often called the first modern sculpture.

Third, Rodin shaped modern sculpture through the people who came out of his orbit. The praticiens and assistants of his studio included sculptors, Bourdelle, Despiau, Pompon, who carried elements of his practice into the new century. Constantin Brâncu?i passed briefly through his studio and then, in reacting against him, in stripping away exactly the expressive surface and the dramatic complexity that Rodin had championed, in pursuing pure and simplified form, defined one of the central directions of modern sculpture; even Brâncu?i's revolt was a revolt against Rodin, and so testifies to Rodin's centrality. The whole field of twentieth-century sculpture, whether it extended Rodin's expressive naturalism or rebelled toward abstraction and simplification, defined itself in relation to him. He was the figure everyone had to come to terms with. That, as much as any single work, is what it means to be the father of a tradition.

It is fair, in assessing the legacy, to hold the achievement and the man together honestly. Rodin's greatness as an artist is not in serious doubt, and the scale of his influence is simply a historical fact. But the same total devotion to the work that produced the sculpture also produced real human casualties: a son left neglected and adrift, a companion of fifty-three years kept waiting a lifetime for the dignity of marriage, a brilliant fellow artist, Camille Claudel, whose gifts were partly consumed in his shadow and whose life ended in a long and terrible confinement. Rodin was not a monster; he was generous in many ways, capable of deep loyalty, admired and loved by many. But he was a man who placed his art above every other claim, and the cost of that ordering of his life was paid, in part, by the people closest to him. A truthful account of Rodin holds the marble and the human cost in the same frame.

CONCLUSION

The life of Auguste Rodin describes one of the longest and steepest ascents in the history of art. He began as a poor and nearsighted child in a small official's apartment in Paris, defeated by ordinary schooling, gifted only with an inexhaustible need to draw and, soon, to model. He was refused, three separate times, by the École des Beaux-Arts, the institution whose entire purpose was to find and train such talent as his. He spent the better part of two decades as an anonymous decorative craftsman, modeling ornament under other men's names, losing his own work to the cold of a studio he could barely afford, burying a beloved sister, surviving a religious crisis, and supporting, in obscurity and poverty, the patient woman and the neglected son who made up his household. He was nearly forty before the world learned his name, and it learned it first as the name of a man accused of fraud.

And then, from that late and difficult beginning, he built the body of work that changed sculpture forever. The Age of Bronze, Saint John the Baptist, The Burghers of Calais, the endless Gates of Hell and the population of masterpieces it generated, The Thinker, The Kiss, The Walking Man, the Balzac, the thousands of drawings, the long sequence of penetrating portrait busts: it is an achievement of a magnitude that places Rodin among the very small number of sculptors, with Michelangelo above all, who can be said to have permanently altered what the art is capable of. He gave sculpture back its life, its truth, its emotion, and its movement; he made the fragment a form and the rough surface a virtue; he carried the art to the threshold of the modern age and pushed it through. The boy the academy rejected became the standard against which the academies, and then the rebels against the academies, would measure themselves.

Rodin's last great act was an act of foresight: he gave everything he had made, and everything he had collected, to the public, in exchange for a house in Paris that would keep his work together forever. He died in the cold of the last full winter of the First World War, an old man honored across the world, buried beside Rose Beuret under a cast of The Thinker. The obscurity that had held him for forty years never returned. More than a century after his death his sculptures stand in the museum he founded and in cities and galleries on every continent, and the seated figure he first imagined as a poet looking down into Hell has become, for the whole of humanity, the image of thought itself. Auguste Rodin waited longer than almost any great artist for the world to see him. When it finally did, it never looked away again.

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