Auguste Rodin: Quotes about art

Auguste Rodin was French sculptor. Explore interesting quotes on art.
Auguste Rodin: 146   quotes 6   likes

“I believed before that (journey to Italy in 1875)… that movement was the whole secret of this art, and I put my models into positions like those of Michael Angelo. But as I went on observing the free attitudes of my models I perceived that they possessed thèse naturally^ and that Michael Angelo had not preconceived them, but merely transcribed them according to the Personal inspiration of human beings moved by the need of action. I went to Rome to look for what may be found everywhere : the latent heroic in every natural movement.”

Auguste Rodin

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

Secret , Art , Nature , Personality

“The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.”

Auguste Rodin

Attributed to Rodin in: Southwestern Art Vol. 6 (1977). p. 20; Partly cited in: A Toolbox for Humanity: More Than 9000 Years of Thought (2004) by Lloyd Albert Johnson, p. 7
1950s-1990s
Context: The artist must learn the difference between the appearance of an object and the interpretation of this object through his medium. The artist must create a spark before he can make a fire and before art is born, the artist must be ready to be consumed by the fire of his own creation.

Art

“Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 7-8
Context: Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated. It is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the Universe and which recreates it, with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood.

Pleasure , Art , Search , Nature

“In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred”

Auguste Rodin

Albert Edward Elsen (1985). The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin. p. 131
1950s-1990s
Context: In art, immorality cannot exist. Art is always sacred even when it takes for a subject the worst excesses of desire; since it has in view only the sincerity of observation, it cannot debase itself. A true work of art is always noble, even when it translates the stirrings of the brute, for at that moment, the artist who has produced it had as his only objective, the most conscientious rendering possible of the impression he has felt.

Art

“In those three years, (from fourteen to seventeen years old)… I came to understand the meaning of a drawing from the life, the synthesis of my art, and the rhythm of animais. I remember that a companion of those days,' of whom I hâve since lost sight, made me see, in a couple of hours, on a very true and simple principle, an observation of the necessary equilibria of movement not taught in the schools, the secret of the plans of a figure. That lesson has influenced my whole life. As for the ornament-maker, in whose workshop I earned a scanty wage, I long deplored being constrained to do so, but I hâve since thought with affection of it, understanding that there are as many sources of beauty in ornament as in the face.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 2-3

Life , Secret , School , Beauty

“The sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface: spirit, soul, love, passion — life. … Sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes.”

Auguste Rodin

In; Victor Frisch, ‎Joseph Twadell Shipley (1939). Auguste Rodin. p. 203: About the act of creation.
1900s-1940s

Love , Life , Art , 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“For to me, this word Art, in its largest sense, signifies those who take pleasure in their work… Artist-carpenters who adjust with joy dovetails and mortises; artist-masons who handle lovingly their trowels; artist-cab drivers, proud of treating their horses humanely-what an ideal state of society that would be.”

Auguste Rodin

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

Pleasure , Art , Sense , Horse

“I admit, that the commonplace man can never, by copying, produce a masterpiece; he notes every detail but he does not really see - the artist penetrates below the surface into the very heart of nature; for him everything is beautiful because beauty in art consists of character.”

Auguste Rodin

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

Beauty , Art , Nature , Heart

“Were this thoroughly understood, industrial art would be entirely revolutionized — industrial art, that barbarous term, an art which concerns itself with commerce and profit.”

Auguste Rodin

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

Art

“In sculpture the projection of the fasciculi must be accentuated, the foreshortening forced, the hollows deepened; sculpture is the art of the hole and the lump, not of clear, well-smoothed, unmodelled figures. Ignorant people, when they see close-knitted true surfaces, say that 'it is not finished.' No notion is falser than that of finish unless it be that of elegance; by means of these two ideas people would kill our art. The way to obtain solidity and life is by work carried out to the fullest, not in the direction of achievement and of copying détails, but in that of truth in the successive schemes. The public, perverted by académie préjudices, confounds art with neatness. The simplicity of the 'École' is a painted cardboard ideal, A cast from life is a copy, the exactest possible copy, and yet it has neither motion nor eloquence. Art intervenes to exaggerate certain surfaces, and also to fine down others. In sculpture everything depends upon the way in which the modelling is carried out with a constant thought of the main line of the scheme, upon the rendering of the hollows, of the projections and of their connections; thus it is that one may get fine lights, and especially fine shadows that are not opaque. Everything should be emphasised according to the accent that it is desired to render, and the degree of amplification is personal, according to the tact and the temperament of each sculptor; and for this reason there is no transmissible process, no studio recipe, but only a true law. I see it in the antique and in Michael Angelo. To work by the profiles, in depth not by surfaces, always thinking of the few geometrical forms from which all nature proceeds, and to make these eternal forms perceptible in the individual case of the object studied, that is my criterion. That is not idealism, it is a part of the handicraft. My ideas have nothing to do with it but for that method; my Danaids and my Dante figures would be weak, bad things. From the large design that I get your mind deduces ideas.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 61-63

Life , People , Truth , Law

“I feel it, but I cannot express it,… I cannot analyse the Celtic genius to my own satisfaction. In the Middle Ages art came from groups, not from individuals. It was anonymous; the sculptors of cathedrals no more put their names to their works than our workmen put theirs on the pavement that they lay. Ah! what an admirable scorn of notoriety! The signature is what destroys us. We do portraits, but what we do is not so great. Thèse kings and queens, on the cathedrals, were not portraits. The fellow-workers stood for one another, and they interpreted; they did not copy. They made clothed figures; the nude and portraiture only date from the Renascence. And then those fellows cut with the tool's end into the block, that is why they were called sculptors. As for us, we are modellers. And what a disgraceful thing that casting from life is, which so many well-known sculptors do not blush to use! It is a mere swindling in art. Art was a vital function to the image-makers of the thirteenth century; they would hâve laughed at the idea of signing what they did, and never dreamed of honours and titles. When once their work was finished, they said no more about it, or else they talked among themselves. How curious it would hâve been to hear them, to be present at their gatherings, where they must hâve discussed in amusing phrases, and with simple, deep ideas!… Whenever the cathedrals disappear civilisation will go down one step. And even now we no longer understand them, we no longer know how to read their silent language. We need to make excavations not in the earth, but towards heaven…”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 63-64; About the genius of the Gothic sculptors.

Life , Age , Dreams , Art

“The great difficulty and crowning glory of art is to paint, to draw, to write, naturally and simply.”

Auguste Rodin

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

Art , Nature , Drawing , Painting

“The search in modem life is for utility; the endeavor is to improve existence materially. Every day, science invents new processes for the feeding, clothing, or transportation of man; she manufactures cheaply inferior products in order to give adulterated luxuries to the greatest number — though it is true that she has also made real improvements in all that ministers to our daily wants. But it is no longer a question of spirit, of thought, of dreams. Art is dead.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 7

Life , Dreams , Art , Search

“The streets of Paris, with their shops of old furniture, etchings, and works of art, are a veritable museum, far less tiring than official museums, and from which one imbibes just as much as one can.”

Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 105

Art