The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin at the Legion of Honor

The work of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) lies at the heart of the Legion of Honor. His art is in evidence as soon as visitors arrive at the museum, where the massive statue “The Thinker” dominates the Court of Honor. When the museum’s wide spectrum of his plasters, models, and fragments is added into the mix, the Legion is arguably one of the most comprehensive holdings of Rodin’s works in the United States.

The earliest bronze in the collection and the first sculpture that Rodin regarded as a success is the Man with the Broken Nose. Rodin rendered the figure’s wrinkled brow and squashed nose based on the features of a local handyman, but its effects were too naturalistic for the Paris Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, which rejected the sculpture when it was submitted in 1865. The academic canons of art at that time demanded more classically idealized features for sculpture, even though there are allusions to antique prototypes in this bust.

Rodin’s freestanding career would only occur after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, when France suffered a humiliating defeat, followed in Paris by the horrors of the Commune. After these troubled times, Rodin moved to work in Brussels with Carrier-Belleuse. He also made a life-changing trip to Italy, where he saw the work of Donatello (Italian, ca. 1386–1466) and Michelangelo Buonarroti (Italian, 1475–1564) and proclaimed “It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture.” Michelangelo’s work would influence Rodin throughout his career. For his first full-scale sculpture, The Age of Bronze, the raised arm of the Renaissance artist’s Dying Slave (1513–1516, Musée du Louvre, Paris) informed the pose, although the treatment of the body was entirely Rodin’s.

The title The Age of Bronze refers to the third of the five Ages of Man articulated by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, which is described as a declining era of war, violence, and destruction. In naming it, the sculptor also intended that The Age of Bronze be interpreted less as a defeated soldier associated with the recent war and more as a lifelike nude figure representing the human condition—a wider, more philosophical theme that Rodin would follow throughout his career. However, the figure’s subtle modeling and naturalism led to the accusation that Rodin had taken casts directly from the model’s body. This controversy had the paradoxical effect of pushing the sculptor even further into the limelight when the piece was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1877. Since that time, The Age of Bronze has become recognized as one of Rodin’s greatest works.

Another sculpture to have caused embroilment for Rodin is The Call to Arms, sometimes known as La Défense. Originally submitted by the sculptor to a public competition for a monument to the defense of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War, it did not even receive an honorable mention from the committee in 1879. The shrill gesturing of the winged Genius of Liberty surmounting the passive Michelangelesque figure of a wounded and dying soldier reflect the horrors of the war, but it was seen as too challenging for the committee’s more stoic, neoclassical perception of monumental sculpture, derived from a return to the stylistic conventions of classical antiquity. Rodin admitted later that it must have “seemed too violent, too strident,” but he was vindicated when The Call to Arms’s potent image of defiance and sacrifice was appropriated as a symbol for France’s struggle during the First World War (1914–1918).

By the 1880s, Rodin started to receive positive recognition from his contemporaries. The reception of his Saint John the Baptist Preaching represented his success. It was modeled at a larger-than-life scale to avoid the controversy of surmoulage (molding directly from an object or a model’s body) surrounding The Age of Bronze. The new sculpture did not avoid contemporary criticism altogether, however, as the absence of the saint’s usual attributes, including a hair shirt, cross, and scroll, created adverse responses. The roughness of the work’s facial features and the hard, wiry quality of its musculature were further contrary to academic ideals of the time, even though these characteristics successfully conveyed the look of a man who lived in a desert. The most innovative aspect that broke this work from the academic tradition is its sense of movement—the saint appears to walk and speak simultaneously.

Rodin also made more personal works during these years, further pushing the boundaries of his artistic agenda. The intertwined figures of The Sculptor and His Muse express not only an erotic relationship between a man and a woman, but also the creative connection between an artist and a model.

Another sculpture of the 1890s with similarly writhing figures in sinuous forms is The Fallen Angel, composed of two female forms, one holding the other. As with The Sculptor and His Muse, there are sexual suggestions, as well as stylistic resonances with the contemporary aesthetic of Art Nouveau in the statue’s swirling and rounded forms.

A similar approach of connected and complex figures is also found in Rodin’s large-scale work Christ and the Magdalene, one of his few religious compositions. In it, the two naked figures—Christ nailed to a rocky cross and Mary Magdalene clinging to his passive body—evoke an overtly sensuous overtone not traditionally chosen for this Crucifixion scene.

In 1880, Rodin was commissioned to make a portal for a future museum of decorative arts in Paris. Although the building was never realized, the artist continued to work assiduously on aspects of the project until 1900 and then in part for the rest of his life. His ambitious idea was to create a great doorway more than twenty feet high in the manner of the famous bronze doors by Lorenzo Ghiberti (Italian, 1378–1455) for the Florence Baptistery known as the Gates of Paradise (1425–1452), but with themes from the Inferno (ca. 1308–1320) by Dante Alighieri (Italian, ca. 1265–1321). For twenty years Rodin toiled on a plaster model, creating complex and fluid sculptures that would burst out of the architectural framework of the vast doors. The writhing, densely modeled figures tumble down the structure, creating an impression of terror, confusion, chaos, and torment.

Through to the end of the nineteenth century, Rodin labored on many of the figures originally intended for the Gates of Hell, changing and adapting them to fit into the doorway that existed only as a plaster model during his lifetime. As time went by, he further transformed many of these pieces into independent sculptures that now comprise some of the sculptor’s most famous works—several of which are represented in the Legion’s collection. The Thinker, seen in the museum’s Court of Honor, was originally meant to be placed, in a much smaller version, above the doors of the Gates, surveying the action. It was first known as The Poet, alluding to Dante himself.

The Kiss was titled Paolo and Francesca when it was first exhibited in 1887, but shortly after that presentation Rodin removed the statue from the Gates of Hell because he felt it no longer befitted the narrative. Scandalous to its initial audiences because Rodin portrayed Dante’s lovers naked, once stripped of its literary associations, The Kiss became one of the sculptor’s most famous and best-loved works.

One of Rodin’s most famous monuments, The Burghers of Calais, was commissioned by the mayor of Calais, in northern France, to commemorate the sacrifice and patriotism of townsmen in 1347, during the Hundred Years’ War. England’s King Edward had offered to spare the starving, besieged city if its top leaders would surrender themselves. Rodin’s monument portrays the six barefoot burghers with the keys to the city and ropes around their necks. His figures express their self-sacrifice as well as their internal anguish. As with so much of Rodin’s work, this piece became embroiled in controversy. It was criticized at the time for not being heroic enough, and the first cast of 1895 was placed, contrary to Rodin’s wishes, on a high pedestal in the city’s public park. Today, it is positioned as the sculptor intended, on a base in front of Calais’s city hall, where viewers can encounter the figures directly.