Auguste Rodin: Trending quotes (page 2)

“Then I gathered the éléments of what people call my symbolism. I do not understand anything about long words and theories. But I am willing to be a symbolist, if that defines the ideas that Michael Angelo gave me, namely that the essence of sculpture is the modelling, the general scheme which alone enables us to render the intensity, the supple variety of movement and character. If we can imagine the thought of God in creating the world, He thought first of the construction, which is the sole principle of nature, of living things and perhaps of the planets. Michael Angelo seems to me rather to derive from Donatello than from the ancients; Raphaël proceeds from them. He understood that an architecture can be built up with the human body, and that, in order to possess volume and harmony, a statue or a group ought to be contained in a cube, a pyramid or some simple figure. Let us look at a Dutch interior and at an interior painted by an artist of the present day. The latter no longer touches us, because it docs not possess the qualities of depth and volume, the science of distances. The artist who paints it does not know how to reproduce a cube. An interior by Van der Meer is a cubic painting. The atmosphere is in it and the exact volume of the objects; the place of these objects has been respected, the modem painter places them, arranges them as models. The Dutchmen did not touch them, but set themselves to render the distances that separated them, that is, the depth. And then, if I go so far as to say that cubic truth, not appearance, is the mistress of things, if I add that the sight of the plains and woods and country views gives me the principle of the plans that I employ on my statues, that I feel cubic truth everywhere, and that plan and volume appear to me as laws of all life and ail beauty, will it be said that I am a symbolist, that I generalise, that I am a metaphysician? It seems to me that I have remained a sculptor and a realist. Unity oppresses and haunts me.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 65-67

Life , God , People , Truth

“If the artist only reproduces superficial features as photography does, if he copies the lineaments of a face exactly, without reference to character, he deserves no admiration. The resemblance which he ought to obtain is that of the soul; that alone matters; it is that which the sculptor or painter should seek beneath the mask of features.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. VII. Of Yesterday and of to-day, p. 121

Soul

“I grant you that the artist does not see Nature as she appears to the vulgar, because his emotion reveals to him the hidden truths beneath appearances.
But, after all, the only principle in Art is to copy what you see. Dealers in esthetics to the contrary, every other method is fatal. There is no recipe for improving nature.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. I. Realism in Art, p. 33

Truth , Art , Nature , Appearance

“Or he may study the hidden mind of the animal. A mixture of feelings and of thoughts, of dumb intelligences and of rudimentary affections, he reads the whole humble moral life of the beast in its eyes and in its movements.
He is even the confidant of nature. The trees, the plants talk to him like friends. The old gnarled oaks speak to him of their kindliness for the human race whom they protect beneath their sheltering branches. The flowers commune with him by the gracious swaying of their stalks, by the singing tones of their petals — each blossom amidst the grass is a friendly word addressed to him by nature.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. II. To the artist, all in nature is beautiful, p. 48

Life , Feeling , Confidence , Intelligence

“The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who calls attention to his style, is like the farmer who devotes his energies to polishing farm implements and never uses them.”

Auguste Rodin

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911

Drawing

“Of course, there is drawing in art as there is style in literature. Style that is mannered, that strains after effect, is bad. No style is good except that which effaces itself in order to concentrate all the attention of the reader upon the subject treated, upon the emotion rendered.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 96

Art , Literature , Drawing

“Nothing is a waste of time if you use the experience wisely.”

Auguste Rodin

As quoted in Heads and Tales (1936) by Malvina Hoffman, p. 47
1900s-1940s

Time , Wise

“I am pervaded by the marvel of this art; but I cannot as yet explain it to myself. The Gothic is the world foreshortened. Where am I to begin? For more than thirty years I have been accumulating and comparing my observations. Perhaps eventually I shall succeed in deducing the rule, the law of divine intelligence; but perhaps I shall not have sufficient time. Then it will be the task of another, younger than myself, who will start his researches earlier, and who, besides, will have been informed by me.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 183; Rodin talks about cathedrals

World , Law , Art , Intelligence

“An artist must possess consummate technique in order to make us forget it.”

Auguste Rodin

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911

Forgetting

“The young artists of to-day understand nothing; they copy to satiety the classic ornaments and designs, and reproduce them in so cold a manner that they lose all meaning. The ancients obtained their designs from nature. They found their models in the garden, even in the vegetable garden. They drew their inspiration from its source. The cabbage-leaf, the oak-leaf, the clover, the thistle, and the brier are the motives of the Gothic capital. It is not photographic truth, but living truth, that we must seek in art.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 125

Truth , Art , Motivation , Understanding

“If in looking at a picture you have been profoundly moved by it, but have not noticed the color or drawing, you may be sure that they are technically perfect.”

Auguste Rodin

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911

Color , Drawing , Perfection

“I sacrificed to the mania of the age, which is to overload things. My modeling is there, the eloquence of the gesture also. The rest would only spoil the essential things. It is a stroke of genius. I am going to write to the under-secretary of state that my monument is ready.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 309

Age

“Take more room, examine my 'Gate' from a little farther off, and you will see once more the effect of the whole — the effect of unity which charms you when it is deprived of its ornamentation. You must understand that my sculpture is so calculated as to melt into the principal masses. For that matter, it completes them by modeling them into the light. The essential designs are there: it is possible that in the course of the final work I may find it necessary to diminish such or such a projection, to fill out such or such a pool of shadow; nevertheless, leave this difficulty to my fifty years of artisanship and experience, and you may be sure that quite by myself I shall find the best way of finishing my work.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 281; About the sculpture The Gates of Hell

Way , Understanding , Light

“But to-day, mankind believes itself able to do without Art. It does not wish to meditate, to contemplate, to dream; it wishes to enjoy physically. The heights and the depths of truth are indifferent to it; it is content to satisfy its bodily appetites. Mankind to-day is brutish — it is not the stuff of which artists are made.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 8

Truth , Dreams , Art , Indifference

“The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who wishes to attract praise to his style, resemble the soldier who plumes himself on his unif onn but refuses to go into battle, or the farmer who polishes the ploughshare instead of driving it into the earth.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. V. Drawing and Color, p. 96

Drawing

“An artist worthy of the name should express all the truth of nature, not only the exterior truth, but also, and above all, the inner truth.
When a good sculptor models a torso, he not only represents the muscles, but the life which animates them — more than the life, the force that fashioned them and communicated to them, it may be, grace or strength, or amorous charm, or indomitable will.
In the works of Michael Angelo, the creative force seems to rumble; in those of Luca della Robbia it smiles divinely. So each sculptor, following his temperament, lends to nature a soul either terrible or gentle.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Ch. Mystery in Art, p. 178

Life , Truth , Smile , Soul

“When I was quite young, as far back as I remember, I drew, but the gift is nothing without the will to make it worth while. The artist must have the patience of water that eats away the rock drop by drop.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 7

Water , Patience

“Nobody does good to men with .”

Auguste Rodin

Attributed to Auguste Rodin in: The Nation, Vol. 109 (1919), p. 6: Rodin means without reward.
1900s-1940s

Men

“I obey nature, I never presume to command her. The first principal in art is to copy what one sees.”

Auguste Rodin

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911

Art , Nature

“It is too evident that if the drawing is bad, the color false, the deepest emotion must fail to express itself.”

Auguste Rodin

RODIN, AUGUSTE. L'Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell, 1911

Color , Drawing , Falseness