Rodin is a French sculptor. His major works include The Thinker, The Bronze Age, The Righteous People of Calais, Balzac, etc. Let's take a look back at the great artist who created The Contemplator.
The sculptor was honed from suffering
Although Rodin had considerable achievements and fame in his middle and late years, and became the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century, the first half of his life did not go well, and he once considered abandoning the road of art in order to make a living. Rodin's artistic career can be said to have begun from a trip to Italy, he visited the classical art capital such as Florence, and was deeply moved and inspired by Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo. Rodin later created the first full-body portrait, the Bronze Age, which as a whole clearly referenced Michelangelo's Dying Slave, but Rodin gave the boy a new form: his expression and the way he extended his arms were very different from the Renaissance master and even traditional statues.
The Bronze Age
The Bronze Age was exhibited at the Salon in Paris, where critics were initially overwhelmed by the lack of a clear theme, while critics unfoundedly accused Rodin of using the "inverted mold" technique to copy plaster models directly on the models, which was a cheat. This false accusation caused a lot of damage to the reputation of Rodin, who debuted, and made him grumble all his life. In order to prove that he did not cheat, most of his later figure sculptures were deliberately enlarged or reduced, because it could not be made of real artificial molds.
Rodin's work challenged and broke with traditional sculpture, which was widely questioned for a long time, but he resolutely did not change his ideas, and eventually gradually became one of the most well-known artists in Europe. Even in the 1880s, when Rodin was already a major figure, when he was commissioned by the government to build a "Hugo Monument" to commemorate the recently deceased French literary hero, the plaster molds he created were still heavily criticized by old-school art critics, and it was not until forty years after his death that the bronze statue was cast.
Hugo Bust
Rodin's Breast Of Hugo, completed in 1883, was two years before Hugo's death.
Statue of Hugo
The Contemplative from The Gates of Hell
Rodin's most famous work must have been the Contemplative, who sat on a stone, with the back of his hand against his chin, as if pondering something very important. It even surpassed Michelangelo's Statue of David as the most famous sculpture in the world, and even now, has been a parody of countless comics or drawings over the years. However, most of us have a general impression of the wheel gallery of the Contemplator, but to grasp its value, we must pay attention to the details.
Rodin's The Contemplative
We generally think that thinking is a spiritual matter, and at best it only uses our brains; but The Contemplator shows a person who uses all the strength of his body to meditate, even his toes clutching the stone on the ground. Rodin himself put it this way:
"My thinker thinks because he thinks not only with his brain, but also with his furrowed eyebrows, swollen nostrils and closed lips, and even more so with every muscle in his arms, back and legs, and he thinks with clenched fists and taut toes."
Another of Rodin's most famous works is The Kiss, which predates Klimt's painting of the same name more than two decades ago. Rodin portrays the same man and woman in a passionate kiss, and the viewer will easily feel the passion in it, and the two even become one. Even if Rodin's "Contemplative" and "Kiss" are not known, both, along with other important independent works, were originally part of Hell's Gate.
Rodin", "Kiss"
The Gates of Hell is the entrance door that Rodin was commissioned in 1880 to make for the future Art Deco Museum. Rodin was given the freedom to choose his own subject, and he chose a scene from the great Roman poet Dante's masterpiece "Divine Comedy and Hell": Dante reads a sentence engraved on it at his oppressive door in the early part of his journey to hell: "Whoever enters this door will not survive."
Rodin's Gates of Hell
In the end, the museum was never built, and it took 37 years to build the museum, and it was not completed until Rodin's death. Also because of the accusation of "overmolding", Rodin portrayed the characters on the door smaller than real people, but the door itself was six meters high and four meters wide. Rodin conceived of the experience that the audience would have when they came to the door, and he wanted to reproduce as much as possible how Dante felt at the door, hoping that his work would have an overwhelming sense of shock to the viewer.
There are many figures in hell on the door, including Adam and Eve, and we can notice that in the middle of the beam of the door is the Meditator, and "he" was originally called "The Poet", referring to Dante himself, looking down from the door to everything in hell. The men and women of The Kiss were also characters in the Divine Comedy, but were later independently composed by Rodin and no longer exist on the door.
Rodin's critique of photography
When Rodin was exhausted, the Impressionist painter Monnet and the musician Debussy, the composer of the Moonlight Song, expressed great support for him. Here we can compare Rodin's similarities with the Impressionist critique of photography.
The Impressionists believed that photography could already act as a precise record of reality, so why should it be compared with the camera, so they turned to the pursuit of various moments in the subjective experience of human vision, creating a rheological world that photography could not express with vague brushstrokes. Rodin has expressed his doubts about photography on many occasions, saying: "It is the artist who is faithful to the truth, and photography is deceiving people."
Rodin embraced naturalism and made it his mission to express the form and material nature of nature, which is not the same as realism. For Rodin, art should not be called a "scientific" and mechanical reproduction of nature, because photography has done this for us in a precise way. Rodin believes that photography has fatal flaws, and we can see his sharp comment:
"If, in fact, in the photograph of the moment, the figure, although photographed in motion, looks like it is suddenly fixed in mid-air, it is because all parts of the body are reproduced in the same twentieth or fortyth of a second, and there is no gradual development of movement as in art. It's the artist who is faithful to the truth, and photography that deceives people. Since time does not stop in reality, and if the artist is to succeed in creating the impression of movement, it will take several moments to achieve it, so that his work will undoubtedly be more unconventional than the scientific image, and the latter time will only be abruptly suspended. ”
Rodin's naturalistic pursuits
So what is Rodin's naturalism? The thousands of sculptures and thousands of paintings he left behind in his lifetime witnessed his creative process. His creative method is not elaborate, just as the painter may make a lot of sketches before painting a huge oil painting, Rodin will also make a lot of "sketches" with clay, he sometimes let the model walk or move around according to his will, and he tries to capture her/their most natural and unpretentious forms with clay from the side.
Rodin believed that works of art do not need to express specific themes or contents, and that the form, form, and shape of art can exist for themselves, and it already has its own value. Therefore, we can see that Rodin was mostly simple and direct in terms of subject matter and creative motivation, and Rodin received a large number of works in his lifetime, many of which were to commemorate the characters or events that he also recognized; his portraits were not built for solemnity or anything, but mainly to prove that his skills were genuine. Some works, such as John the Baptist preaching, are completed with seemingly religious titles.
John the Baptist preaching
One of Rodin's immortal masterpieces is a fragment titled The Walking Man. The sculpture of the human body is on the ground with two feet at the same time, but it gives people the feeling of moving forward in the walk, which is different from our general common sense. Echoing Rodin's critique of photography, he believed that to express multiple aspects of things at the same time, it was only seen in a continuous way, so he distorted or changed the things of nature in his work, which in turn was the most faithful way of representing nature.
Rodin, "The Walking Man"
Follow-up question: What is Rodin's "real product"?
Some artists are very good at protecting their work to maintain its value in the art market, but Rodin did not hesitate much in this regard. In addition to generously donating his works to the French government, Rodin also allowed the outside world to copy his works from his plaster molds, so we can see castings of Rodin's important works such as "The Contemplator" and "Hell's Gate" in major art galleries and academies around the world.
"Hell's Gates" at Stanford University Center for the Arts
But we probably already think that this immediately raises questions: should these castings be considered "genuine" by Rodin? What is even more troublesome is that this situation provokes outlaws to imitate fakes, and it is even more difficult for appraisers to distinguish between "authenticity" and falsity. The French government even ordered restrictions on the practice of re-casting from the statue plaster mold, for example, the same plaster mold can only make twelve castings. This difficult problem for the art world makes us think further about the authenticity of works of art.