Editing Auguste Rodin (section)

==Aesthetic==
[[File:Rodin p1070095.jpg|thumb|upright|A famous "fragment": ''[[The Walking Man]]'' (1877–78)]]

Rodin was a naturalist, less concerned with monumental expression than with character and emotion.<ref>{{cite news|newspaper=The Times|date=14 July 1931|page=12|title=Art Exhibitions: Auguste Rodin}}</ref> Departing with centuries of tradition, he turned away from the idealism of the Greeks, and the decorative beauty of the [[Baroque]] and [[Baroque Revival architecture|neo-Baroque]] movements. His sculpture emphasized the individual and the concreteness of flesh, and suggested emotion through detailed, textured surfaces, and the interplay of light and shadow. To a greater degree than his contemporaries, Rodin believed that an individual's character was revealed by his physical features.<ref name="H76">Hale, 76.</ref>

Rodin's talent for surface modeling allowed him to let every part of the body speak for the whole. The male's passion in ''The Thinker'' is suggested by the grip of his toes on the rock, the rigidness of his back, and the differentiation of his hands.<ref name="morey"/> Speaking of ''The Thinker'', Rodin illuminated his aesthetic: "What makes my Thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and legs, with his clenched fist and gripping toes."<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.nga.gov/collection/sculpture/flash/zone2-2.htm|title=NGA Sculpture Galleries: Auguste Rodin|publisher=[[National Gallery of Art]], Washington, D.C.|access-date=12 December 2006|format=[[Adobe Flash]]| archive-url= https://web.archive.org/web/20061130113846/http://www.nga.gov/collection/sculpture/flash/zone2-2.htm| archive-date= 30 November 2006 | url-status= live}}</ref>

Sculptural fragments to Rodin were autonomous works, and he considered them the essence of his artistic statement. His fragments – perhaps lacking arms, legs, or a head – took sculpture further from its traditional role of portraying likenesses, and into a realm where forms existed for their own sake.<ref>Hale, 69.</ref> Notable examples are ''[[The Walking Man]]'', ''[[Meditation (sculpture)|Meditation without Arms]]'', and ''[[Iris, Messenger of the Gods]]''.

Rodin saw suffering and conflict as hallmarks of modern art. "Nothing, really, is more moving than the maddened beast, dying from unfulfilled desire and asking in vain for grace to quell its passion."<ref name="alhadeff"/> [[Charles Baudelaire]] echoed those themes and was among Rodin's favorite poets. Rodin enjoyed music, especially the opera composer [[Gluck]], and wrote a book about [[List of cathedrals in France|French cathedrals]]. He owned a work by the as-yet-unrecognized [[Vincent van Gogh|Van Gogh]] and admired the forgotten [[El Greco]].<ref name="werner"/>

===Method===
Instead of copying traditional academic postures, Rodin preferred his models to move naturally around his studio (despite their nakedness).<ref name="morey"/> The sculptor often made quick sketches in clay that were later fine-tuned, cast in plaster, and cast in bronze or carved from marble. Rodin's focus was on the handling of clay.<ref name="ReferenceA">Quoted in Jianou & Goldscheider, 62.</ref>

George Bernard Shaw sat for a portrait and gave an idea of Rodin's technique: "While he worked, he achieved a number of miracles. At the end of the first fifteen minutes, after having given a simple idea of the human form to the block of clay, he produced by the action of his thumb a bust so living that I would have taken it away with me to relieve the sculptor of any further work."<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

He described the evolution of his bust over a month, passing through "all the stages of art's evolution": first, a "[[Byzantine art|Byzantine]] masterpiece", then "[[Bernini]] intermingled", then an elegant [[Houdon]]. "The hand of Rodin worked not as the hand of a sculptor works, but as the work of ''[[Elan Vital (term)|Elan Vital]]''. The ''Hand of God'' is his own hand."<ref name="ReferenceA"/>

After he completed his work in clay, he employed highly skilled assistants to re-sculpt his compositions at larger sizes (including any of his large-scale monuments such as ''The Thinker''), to cast the clay compositions into plaster or bronze, and to carve his marbles. Rodin's major innovation was to capitalize on such multi-staged processes of 19th century sculpture and their reliance on plaster casting.<ref name="Victoria and Albert Museum">{{Cite web |title=Auguste Rodin: production techniques · V&A |url=https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/rodin-production-techniques |access-date=1 July 2023 |website=Victoria and Albert Museum |language=en |archive-date=21 March 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230321194321/https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/rodin-production-techniques |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=ArtMuseLondon |date=20 June 2021 |title=The Making of Rodin at the Tate Modern |url=https://artmuselondon.com/2021/06/20/the-making-of-rodin-at-the-tate-modern/ |access-date=1 July 2023 |website=ARTMUSELONDON |language=en |archive-date=3 February 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230203162707/https://artmuselondon.com/2021/06/20/the-making-of-rodin-at-the-tate-modern/ |url-status=live }}</ref>

Since clay deteriorates rapidly if not kept wet or fired into a terra-cotta, sculptors used plaster casts as a means of securing the composition they would make from the fugitive material that is clay. This was common practice amongst Rodin's contemporaries, and sculptors would exhibit plaster casts with the hopes that they would be commissioned to have the works made in a more permanent material. Rodin, however, would have multiple plasters made and treat them as the raw material of sculpture, recombining their parts and figures into new compositions, and new names.<ref name="Victoria and Albert Museum" />

As Rodin's practice developed into the 1890s, he became more and more radical in his pursuit of fragmentation, the combination of figures at different scales, and the making of new compositions from his earlier work. A prime example of this is the bold ''[[The Walking Man]]'' (1899–1900),<ref>{{Cite web |title=Walking Man {{!}} All Works {{!}} The MFAH Collections |url=https://emuseum.mfah.org/objects/47819/walking-man |access-date=1 July 2023 |website=emuseum.mfah.org |language=en |archive-date=1 July 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230701130518/https://emuseum.mfah.org/objects/47819/walking-man |url-status=live }}</ref> which was exhibited at his major one-person show in 1900. This is composed of two sculptures from the 1870s that Rodin found in his studio – a broken and damaged torso that had fallen into neglect and the lower extremities of a statuette version of his 1878 ''St. John the Baptist Preaching'' he was having re-sculpted at a reduced scale.<ref>{{Cite web |date=25 April 2018 |title=Together and apart: Fragmentation and completion in Auguste Rodin |url=https://stanforddaily.com/2018/04/25/together-and-apart-fragmentation-and-completion-in-auguste-rodin-part-1/ |access-date=1 July 2023 |language=en-US |archive-date=9 September 2018 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180909023928/https://www.stanforddaily.com/2018/04/25/together-and-apart-fragmentation-and-completion-in-auguste-rodin-part-1/ |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |date=1 October 2015 |title=Shadow: Rodin and the Modern Psyche |url=https://ahlstromappraisals.com/art-history-blog/shadow-rodin-and-the-modern-psyche |access-date=1 July 2023 |website=Ahlstrom Appraisals LLC |language=en-US |archive-date=6 July 2019 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190706133317/https://ahlstromappraisals.com/art-history-blog//shadow-rodin-and-the-modern-psyche |url-status=live }}</ref>

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File:Rodin The Shade.jpg|''[[The Shade (sculpture)|The Shade]]'' (1880–81), [[High Museum of Art]], Atlanta
File:Age of bronze plaster.jpg|A [[plaster]] of ''[[The Age of Bronze]]''
</gallery>