Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin, The Thinker, 1880, Bronze

What you need to know about the artist and the artwork:

• born in 1844
• Wants to study art as he is gifted in drawing and has been doing so ever since he can remember, and fails his entrance exam 3 times to get into the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Has an aversion towards the conventional art system ever thereafter.
• Considers joining a religious order in 1862 after the tragic death of his sister, but is convinced by the founder that his true calling is to sculpt.
• In 1872-5 he makes a number of sculptures in a style similar to Michelangelo while studying under a master sculptor.
• Goes to Italy and studies Michelangelo's works in an in depth manner.
• His style is that of REALISM.

What is Realism?

1. An art movement, strongest in Paris in the mid-19th century, where artists portrayed what was really going on around them, and life as it was.
2. With a great divide in class structure, the results of portraying the down and dirty and truisms of society, controversy typically followed art of the realists.
3. Rodin did not want to send a political message, but by portraying everyday subject matter and by creating his subjects very realistically, he managed to cause a stir anyways.
   

The Thinker

• In 1880 receives a commission to design a decorative entrance to the Museum of Decorative Arts. (the museum is never built). This project, worked on alongside with other works, will take Rodin the rest of his life, and he will not finish it.
• He draws inspiration from Ghiberti's The Gates of Paradise, which he has seen on his trip to Florence, Italy.

Ghiberti's The Gates of Paradise

• Dante draws inspiration from Dante's Divine Comedy:
  
• The Divine Comedy is a 14 century work by the poet Dante. It is a series of 3 epic poems that document the writers journey through the 3 spiritual realms according to the Catholic traditon: Heaven (Paradiso), Pergatory (Pergatorio), and Hell (Inferno). Rodin decides to structure his gates after Dante's Inferno.

The Gates of Hell
The Inferno documents Dante's journey through Hell, in which he is led down the 9 circles (each getting worse than the next) with the ancient poet Virgil as his guide.

The Thinker is actually Dante himself overlooking the gruesome chaos that is hell below.

Several of Rodin's most famous sculptures have come from studies for figures for the Gates of Hell including The Thinker and The Kiss.

The Kiss

• It was very typical of Rodin to leave his works unfinished, as can be seen by the works below.

Walking Man