• About
  • Books
  • Contact
  • Ebooks
  • Media Appearances
  • Videos

Fineartebooks's Blog

~ Fine Art Blog

Fineartebooks's Blog

Tag Archives: Auguste Rodin and emotion

Auguste Rodin and the Physicality of Emotion

06 Thursday Oct 2016

Posted by Romantic and Postromantic Art in Auguste Rodin, Claudia Moscovici, modern sculpture, Romanticism and Postromanticism

≈ Comments Off on Auguste Rodin and the Physicality of Emotion

Tags

Auguste Rodin, Auguste Rodin and emotion, Claudia Moscovici, modern sculpture, postromanticism, The Age of Bronze, The Kiss

rodin-the-kiss1

By Claudia Moscovici

Constantin Brancusi considered Auguste Rodin not only a precursor, but also the first great modern sculptor. “In the nineteenth century,” Brancusi declared, “the situation in sculpture was desperate. Rodin arrived and transformed everything.” In a way, Rodin was fortunate that initially he wasn’t part of the system. Rejected several times by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Rodin was not trained according to the rigid academic standards of the time. Nonetheless, he never gave up and showed great confidence in his talent. In 1865, for example, his sculpture The Man with the Broken Nose (1865 and 1875) was initially rejected by the jury of the Salon, partly because the clay fissured and the sculpture cracked in the back of the head.

L'Homme au nez cassŽ

Years later, Rodin redid the sculpture, whom he regarded as his “first good sculpture,” and this time it was accepted by the Salon. Rodin would follow his own path, but like the Impressionists, he also sought acceptance and acclaim by the artistic establishment.

rodinmanwiththebrokennose1875

After a trip to Italy, the works of Michelangelo served as his main inspiration. Like the Renaissance masters, he studied human anatomy. In fact, his sculptures were so life-like in his sculptures that his first major work, The Age of Bronze (1876), caused a great controversy. Rodin was accused of cheating by making it from a live cast of his model. Rodin protested and put together an impressive dossier defending himself, but to no avail. In Rodin’s defense, his model, Auguste Neyt, recalled “I had to train myself to strike the pose. It was hardly an easy thing to do. Rodin did not want straining muscles; in fact, he loathed the academic ‘pose’… The master wanted ‘natural action taken from real life.” (http://www.musee-rodin.fr/en/resources/chronology-auguste-rodin)

Eventually, however, thanks to recommendations made by influential friends, the French government bought the sculpture in 1880 for the hefty sum of 2000 francs. Henceforth Rodin’s fame would continue to rise.

800px-rodin_the_bronze_age

The charge of the Salon could have been further from the truth. Rodin never worked from live casts. He asked his models, both male and female, to walk around freely in his studio. Often he would follow them around, making rapid sketches of their movements. When he spotted them in a particularly interesting pose or expression, he would try to capture it quickly, modeling in clay. For Rodin, as for Michelangelo, the body itself was expressive of emotion. He stated: “I have always endeavored to express the inner feelings by the mobility of the muscles.” It is said that Rodin’s wife, Rose Beuret, once stormed into his studio in a fit of rage and began screaming at him. She would have had plenty of reasons to be upset with Rodin since he notoriously cheated on her with his young models, most of whom were can-can dancers. Instead of responding in kind, however, Rodin quickly modeled her angry expression in clay, saying “Thank you, my dear. That was excellent.” Nothing was as inspirational for him as visible emotion, read in facial expressions and gestures.

Despite the religious allusions of The Gates of Hell, his chef d’oeuvre, Rodin brings emotion down to earth by materializing a passion that functions not only as a connection between the human and the divine, but also as an intimate and profound connection between earthly lovers. Perhaps no one else has described Rodin’s most sensual and moving sculpture, The Kiss, as eloquently as his friend, the art critic Gustave Geffroy:

“The man’s head is bent, that of the woman is lifted, and their mouths meet in a kiss that seals the intimate union of their two beings. Through the extraordinary magic of art, this kiss, which is scarcely indicated by the meeting of their lips, is clearly visible, not only in their meditative expressions, but still more in the shiver that runs equally through both bodies, from the nape of the neck to the soles of the feet, in every fiber of the man’s back, as it bends, straightens, grows still, where everything adores—bones, muscles, nerves, flesh—in his leg, which seems to twist slowly, as if moving to brush against his lover’s leg; and in the woman’s feet, which hardly touch the ground, uplifted with her whole being as she is swept away with ardor and grace.”

Rodin revealed human love and life as a process of mutual creation between women and men. Passion is not only a union with those we desire and adore, but also an elevation through shared feelings and sensuality which is always in process, never complete. His representations of the fragility of our mutual creation were as inchoate, vulnerable yet compelling as the material shapes that seemed to emerge only part-finished from the bronze or blocks of stone.

Share this:

  • Share
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Reddit
  • Print
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

Like this:

Like Loading...

Recent Posts

  • Frédéric Jousset: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora
  • The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo
  • Darida Paints Brancusi
  • Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories
  • The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk

Top Posts

  • Daniel Gerhartz: The Beauty of Representational Art
  • Why We Love Brancusi
  • Diderot's Salons: Art Criticism of Greuze, Chardin, Boucher and Fragonard
  • Sensuality in Art: the Erotic versus the Pornographic
  • Classical Sculpture
  • Rodin's Muses: Camille Claudel and Rose Beuret
  • Art and Emotion
  • On saving European art from the Nazis and The Monuments Men
  • The Legacy of Impressionism: Individualism, Autonomy and Originality in Art
  • The legacy of Michael Hafftka: Emotion and expressionism in Holocaust art

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 272 other subscribers

Blog Stats

  • 447,152 hits

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Archives

  • July 2020
  • April 2020
  • March 2019
  • September 2018
  • May 2017
  • October 2016
  • September 2016
  • November 2015
  • August 2014
  • June 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • September 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • September 2011
  • August 2011
  • July 2011
  • June 2011
  • May 2011
  • April 2011
  • March 2011
  • February 2011
  • January 2011
  • December 2010
  • November 2010
  • October 2010
  • September 2010
  • August 2010

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 272 other subscribers
  • RSS - Posts
  • RSS - Comments

Blogroll

  • Be Art Magazine
  • Catchy Magazine
  • Edson Campos
  • Edson Campos Art reviews
  • Fine Art E-book Website
  • Leonardo Pereznieto's art
  • Literatura de Azi
  • LiterNet
  • Litkicks
  • Postromantic art
  • Revista Hiperboreea
  • Support Forum

March 2023
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728293031  
« Jul    

Blog at WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • Fineartebooks's Blog
    • Join 272 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Fineartebooks's Blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    %d bloggers like this: