Rejected thrice by Beaux-Arts, he founded modern sculpture
Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) failed the École des Beaux-Arts three times, then modeled clay surfaces so turbulent they scandalised myth-and-allegory taste. The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Burghers of Calais grew from an unfinished museum portal—the Gates of Hell.
Rodin was born in Paris in 1840 to a working-class family; his father was a clerk in the police department. Largely self-taught, he began drawing at ten and from 14 to 17 studied at the Petite École under Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, who trained pupils to draw from memory and their own observation. In 1857 the École des Beaux-Arts turned down his clay model, and two later applications failed too, probably because the Neoclassical judges disliked his lighter 18th-century training. For nearly twenty years he earned his keep making ornaments and architectural decoration.
When his older sister Maria died in a convent in 1862, a guilt-stricken Rodin joined a Catholic congregation as a lay brother. Its founder, Peter Julian Eymard, saw that he belonged in a studio and lent him the garden shed; the bust of Eymard from 1863 is his first securely dated work. From 1864 he lived with the seamstress Rose Beuret, who bore him a son in 1866, and he worked as chief assistant to Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse until 1870. Six years in Belgium followed, and a two-month visit to Italy in 1875 put Donatello and Michelangelo at the centre of his thinking.
In 1880 he won a commission for the portal of a planned decorative arts museum. The museum was never built, but he spent much of four decades on the Gates of Hell, and figures from it grew into The Thinker and The Kiss. In 1883 he met the 18-year-old Camille Claudel, who became his model, assistant, lover and rival, until they split in 1898 because he would not leave Beuret.
His monuments to the burghers of Calais and to Balzac, chosen in 1891, upset the bodies that commissioned them, yet the Salon made him a juror in 1889 and after his World’s Fair exhibit he was famous worldwide by 1900. Students included Constantin Brâncuși and Antoine Bourdelle. He finally married Beuret in the last year of both their lives and died in November 1917.
Source: Auguste Rodin
