Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is a French sculptor who revolutionized the medium, thus creating some of the best-known — and best-loved — sculptures of our time.
He is renowned for breathing life into clay, creating naturalistic, often vigorously modelled sculptures that convey intense human emotions: love, ecstasy, agony or grief. Breaking the rules of academic convention and classical idealism, Rodin ushered in a new form of highly expressive sculpture that went on to influence generations of artists.
Born in Paris on 12 November 1840, just two days before Claude Monet, Rodin displayed a precocious artistic talent from an early age. At 14, he was enrolled in the Ecole Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques in Paris, known as the ‘Petite Ecole’, though later he failed three times to enter the hallowed Ecole des Beaux-Arts, instead forging his career as a largely self-taught artist.
Source:
www.christies.com/en/stories/rodin-the-father-of-modern-s...
You can also view footage of Rodin here:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=OcGTqxsIUjM
Tags: vintage history arts Auguste Rodin sculptures sculptors France Paris BLACK AND WHITE black and white photographs black and white photos old photos old photographs museums
© All Rights Reserved
La Porte de l’Enfer (The Gates of Hell) by Auguste Rodin
Ornate, bronze door panels and frame showing figures and scenes in relief.
Unfinished, Kunsthaus Zürich Art Museum (Switzerland)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auguste_Rodin#/media/File:Z%C3%BCri...
In 1880, Rodin was commissioned by the French government to create a set of bronze doors for a new building that was to be a museum of decorative arts in Paris. Inspired by Dante’s Inferno (from the Divine Comedy), the doors depict a mass of writhing figures enduring the torments of hell.
Rodin could never bring himself to finish this magnum opus. The museum was never built and so the Gates became an autonomous artwork — ‘the source of almost everything that met with success,’ as the artist later reminisced.
Indeed, many of Rodin’s greatest works, including The Kiss, and The Thinker, started as designs of figures for The Gates of Hell, and were only later presented as separate and independent works.
www.christies.com/lot/lot-auguste-rodin-1840-1917-eve-gra...
Tags: vintage history arts Auguste Rodin sculptures sculptors France Paris museums
© All Rights Reserved
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Le baiser, 3ème réduction, conceived in 1886. Bronze with brown patina. Height: 15⅝ in (39.8 cm). Conceived in 1886, this version referred to as ‘3ème réduction’ executed in this size in 1901. Sold for €756,000 on 4 April 2023 at Christie’s in Paris.
An icon of romantic love, The Kiss in fact shows a couple condemned.
Arguably Rodin’s most famous work, The Kiss presents two lovers locked in a blissful embrace. Yet these figures are in fact two of Dante’s doomed medieval characters, namely Francesca da Rimini and her lover Paolo Malatesta.
Francesca’s husband (who was Paolo’s brother) found the pair and enraged by their adulterous liaison, stabbed them both to death, condemning them to an eternity in hell.
www.christies.com/en/stories/rodin-the-father-of-modern-s...
Tags: vintage history arts Auguste Rodin sculptures sculptors France Paris museums
© All Rights Reserved
www.loc.gov/item/2016796802/
Title:
•[The flight of love]
Names
•Rodin, Auguste, 1840-1917, sculptor
•Detroit Publishing Co., publisher
Created / Published
•[between 1900 and 1912]
Headings
•- Love
•- Sculpture
Notes
•- Title and date based on Detroit, Thistle Publications (1912).
•- "M 119" on transparency.
•- Sculpture by Auguste Rodin.
•- Detroit Publishing Co. no. 048057.
•- Gift; State Historical Society of Colorado; 1949.
Source Collection
•Detroit Publishing Company photograph collection (Library of Congress)
Digital Id
•det 4a31262 //hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/det.4a31262
LCCN Permalink
•https://lccn.loc.gov/2016796802
Tags: vintage history arts Auguste Rodin sculptures sculptors France Paris BLACK AND WHITE black and white photographs black and white photos old photos old photographs museums
© All Rights Reserved
Auguste rodin (1840-1917), Penseur, Taille de la Porte dit ‘Moyen Modèle’, conceived in 1880. Bronze with dark brown patina. 28⅛ x 16½ x 23 in (71.3 x 42 x 58.3 cm). This proof cast circa 1928. Sold for €10,739,500 on 30 June 2022 at Christie’s in Paris
www.christies.com/en/stories/rodin-the-father-of-modern-s...
Tags: vintage history arts Auguste Rodin sculptures sculptors France Paris museums
© All Rights Reserved
