Rodin

I'm taking an art appreciation course for a degree I'm no longer interested in pursuing, so I'm just struggling through to the end of it. We watched a video on Rodin's The Gates of Hell and had to type a paper based on the video. I thought I'd share it here. One thing I learned from the video that didn't fit into the report that I found interesting was about Rodin's sculpture The Kiss. The two lovers in the kiss were based upon a couple from Dante's The Divine Comedy, they were engaged in an extramarital affair and were caught kissing by the women's jealous husband who quickly sent the pair to hell. Rodin decided the Kiss was to tender of a moment and instead depicted the couple on the door as falling into hell, however he displayed his original concept (the one we all know) as a stand alone piece. I find all this amusing because we have a copy of The Kiss on the dresser in our bedroom, not knowing the historic/literary meaning of the piece it looks like a couple in love and sharing a very tender moment. I wonder if Rodin would enjoy knowing that people today still love his work or if he'd be spinning over in his grave knowing that his work has become bedroom decor.

Sculpture/Rodin

            Rodin’s The Thinker is arguably one of the most recognizable sculptures of our time. The sculpture and the pose have been copied and used so often in pop culture that, personally, I was aware of The Thinker long before I knew of Rodin, Dante, or The Gates of Hell. As the video showed The Gates of Hell is not only a monumental work of art it’s also the story of Rodin’s career and the evolution of sculpture itself.

            Rodin was originally asked to design a work for a museum in Paris, a museum that never saw completion, and so Rodin spent a good part of his life working and reworking the figures that would go upon the door and the door itself. Rodin was inspired by Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze door on Florence’s Baptistery of San Giovanni, which Michelangelo had dubbed the Gates of Paradise. He was also inspired by much of Michelangelo’s work, especially his work The Last Judgment. The Gates of Hell is, at least in part, a depiction of Dante’s great work The Divine Comedy, with a number of prominent characters from that work depicted on the door. Dante himself is represented in the pensive figure sitting on the lentil of the door, later known as The Thinker; Rodin depicts Dante nude and in great concentration, intent on the creative process, which was a departure from how Dante was typically depicted in art. Depicting Dante in a not readily identifiable way allowed Rodin to make him a symbol for all creators, his entire body gripped with the desire to create; in fact with the in-the-round molding of the figure and it’s placement on the door it’s easy to read a god-like, or Christ-like, meaning in his character. As the museum the doors were meant for never came to be Rodin began exhibiting individual pieces from the door, worked in wax and then cast in bronze, both in the size they had originally been made and in larger versions. It’s the larger version of The Thinker that most of us are familiar with these days.

            The doors themselves are a marvel as Rodin combines low-relief, high-relief, and in-the-round figures to give the doors a sense of feeling and movement. He has highly detailed pieces combined with almost abstract shapes that seem to melt into, or rise out of, the doors themselves; this was a departure from the mostly representational works of sculpture in Rodin’s day. Some of his figures lacked hands, or heads, or other body parts that were not needed for what Rodin wanted them to depict. When Rodin exhibited his door in 1900, at this point still in wax, he intentionally removed most of the in-the-round sculptures from it, leaving an abstract door with reliefs and shapes that allowed for greater play of light and shadows upon it. This abstract, seemingly unfinished, piece became known as one of the first abstract works of sculpture.

            It’s interesting to me that many of Rodin’s most famous works and his foray into abstract sculpture came about because of the failure of the museum for which his Gates of Hell were originally intended. I wonder had the museum opened as scheduled, would The Thinker be the famous, easily recognizable work of art that it is today.

Sources- http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/gatesofparadise-200711.html

http://www.nga.gov/collection/sculpture/noflash/zone2-2.htm

http://www.youtube.com/user/canaleducatif?feature=watch (BlackBoard video)