Auguste Rodin is generally regarded as the greatest sculptor of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, not only a true successor to the lineage of Donatello, Michelangelo, Bernini, Coysevox, Canova, and Degas, but also the direct precursor to the inventions and abstractions of Maillol, Picasso, Archipenko, Nadelman, and Moore. If Rodin is now considered the link between classical and modern sculpture, he was something of a misfit during his youth, derided by the academicians as being incompetent, and mocked by the avant-garde as being hopelessly conventional. Once he grew famous, though, both the bourgeoisie and the pacesetters embraced his work, emphasizing as it does the sensual and the erotic as symbols of psychological states that can be depicted visually far more eloquently than mere words will allow.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just opened its newest wing with a substantial show of his oeuvre, drawn from the collection of B. Gerald Cantor, who donated $5 million for the construction of the new addition to the museum, and another $2 million for a roof garden to open next year. The seventy pieces on display offer a nearly complete retrospective of the Frenchman's remarkable career. Most of his best-known works are included in several forms--clay, plaster, terra-cotta, marble, bronze, and drawing--and the show includes an instructive step-by-step demonstration of casting in the lost-wax process.
Throughout much of this century Rodin's work was denigrated by the heralds of non-objective art as being old-fashioned, merely "illustrational," in the words of critic Roger Fry. This show establishes beyond a shadow of a doubt the seminal importance of this artist, whose work was at once revolutionary and classical. His pre-Cubist abstraction of form and expressionistic modeling reveal the astonishing extent to which he was in fact the father of modern sculpture. However, whereas the modernist artists who initially drew inspiration from him forsook classical humanist ideals and aesthetics, Rodin revised and vitalized these by creating a plastic language that conveyed emotion with the greatest potency and conviction.
Born to working-class parents in Paris' Latin Quarter in 1840, Rodin studied animal anatomy under the great sculptor Barye, but was thrice rejected by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He rented a stable as a home and studio, having decided that that monastic order he had recently joined was no real answer to the pain his sister's early death brought him. He soon took up with an illiterate seamstress named Rose Beuret, and she bore him his only son, out of wedlock. Notorious as a promiscuous libertine, he somehow remained faithful to Rose even as he undertook flings with a full range of models and others. In 1916, when he was seventy-sex and she seventy-two, he finally married her in order to protect her claims on his estate. She died two weeks after the ceremony, and he followed her to the grave within a year, a parsonage of world-class repute, easily the most celebrated sculptor on earth at the time.
It took Rodin a long time to get established, but with money he made during a few years in Belgium he was able to travel to Italy, where he fell in love with Michelangelo's brooding, tortured visions. Those who know that Renaissance master's work will quickly see in the Thinker, The Shades, and the series of Caryatids Rodin's affinity for hyper-muscular flesh, twisted in silent agonies of despair. By 1875 Rodin managed to gain entry into several competitions and to attract critical
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