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At
the height of his career, Auguste Rodin (1840-1917)
was regarded as the greatest sculptor since
Michelangelo. Straying from nineteenth-century
academic conventions, Rodin created his own
sense of personal artistic expressions that
focused on the vitality of the human spirit.
His modeling techniques captured the movement
and depth of emotion of his subjects by altering
traditional poses and gestures. His pioneering
work has been a critical link between traditional
and modern figurative sculpture. Controversial
and celebrated within his own lifetime, Rodin
broke new aesthetic ground with his raw, vigorous
sculptures of the human form in all of its varied
manifestations.
Auguste Rodin's genius at capturing the essence
of human experience, whether erotic, tortured,
melancholy or heroic, provided inspiration for
a host of successors such as Henri Matisse,
Aristide Maillol, Constantin Brancusi and Henry
Moore. His purposely fragmented sculptures,
appreciated largely after his death, prefigure
the innovations typically identified with 20th
century artists. For Rodin, beauty in art consisted
in the truthful representation of inner states,
and to this end he often subtly distorted anatomy.
His sculpture, in bronze and marble, falls generally
into two styles. The more characteristic style
reveals a deliberate roughness of form and a
painstaking surface modeling; the other is marked
by a polished surface and delicacy of form.
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