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Auguste Rodin , né à Paris le 12 novembre 1840, et mort à Meudon, le 17 novembre 1917, est l'un des plus importants sculpteurs français de la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, considéré comme un des pères de la sculpture moderne.

Héritier des siècles d'humanisme, l'art réaliste de Rodin est un aboutissement, croisement de romantisme et d'impressionnisme dont la sculpture est modelée par la lutte entre la forme et la lumière.

La virilité de l'artiste, surnommé en son temps le « Bouc sacré », provoqua des drames semi-publics ou privés et est au centre d'une expression plastique de la sensualité, de l'érotisme, mais aussi de la douleur.

Par sa capacité de travail et d'organisation, Rodin laisse une œuvre hors norme.

✵ 12. novembre 1840 – 17. novembre 1917
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Auguste Rodin Citations

“Dante est non seulement un visionnaire et un écrivain; c’est aussi un sculpteur. Son expression est lapidaire au bon sens du mot. Quand il décrit un personnage, il le campe avec son attitude et son geste. […] J’ai vécu un an entier avec Dante, ne vivant que de lui et qu’avec lui, dessinant les huit cycles de l’enfer…”

Auguste Rodin
enfer , Sens

Auguste Rodin: Citations en anglais

“I admit, of course, that the artist does not see nature as the vulgar do. His emotion reveals to him the inner truths that underlie appearance. But the only principle In art is to copy what one sees. Every other method is ruinous. No one can embellish Nature. It is simply and solely a question of seeing. Doubtless a mediocre man, when he copies will never produce a work of art. He looks without seeing. No matter how minutely he observes, the result will be flat and without character. But the artist's trade is not for mediocre men, and no amount of training can supply them with talent. The artist sees - he sees with his heart. He sees deep into the heart of Nature. To the artist everything in Nature is beautiful.
The vulgarian imagines that what looks to him ugly In Nature is not material for the artist. He would forbid us to represent what displeases and offends him. He makes a grave mistake. What is commonly called ugliness in Nature may become a great beauty in art.
In the realm of realities, people regard as ugly everything that is deformed and diseased and that suggests sickness, weakness and suffering. They regard as ugly everything that defies regularity, which is to them the symbol and condition of health and strength. A hump is ugly, bow-legs are ugly, misery in rags is ugly. Ugly, again, are the soul and conduct of the immoral, the vicious, the criminal man, the abnormal man who is an enemy of society; ugly is the soul of the parricide, the traitor, the unscrupulous slave of ambition. And it is right that the lives and the of which we can expect only evil should be given an odious epithet.”

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Auguste Rodin

Rodin on realism, 1910

“Art, moreover, is taste. It is the reflection of the artist's heart upon all the objects that he creates. It is the smile of the human soul upon the house and on the furnishing. It is the charm of thought and of sentiment embodied in all that is of use to man. But how many of our contemporaries fed the necessity of taste in house or furnishing? Formerly, in old France, Art was everywhere. The smallest bourgeois, even the peasant, made use only of articles which pleased the eye. Their chairs, their tables, their pitchers and their pots were beautiful. Today Art is banished from daily life. People say that the useful need not be beautiful. All is ugly, all is made in haste and without grace by stupid machines. The artist is regarded as an antagonist. Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist's musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!”

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Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 8-9

“Painting, literature, music, are more closely allied than the public usually admit. They are merely different means of expression.”

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Auguste Rodin

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

“Yes, they are beautiful… The shirt, the blouse are garments the folds of which yield simple planes and effects that, rightly rendered, are those of true sculpture. But there is something better still, and that is sackcloth. If I had clothed my 'Burghers of Calais' in sackcloth, they would certainly be more beautiful. I did not dare to. Some one else will do this and will succeed. It is sufficient to express an idea and leave it to its destiny.”

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Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 295-296; About the sculpture The Burghers of Calais

“Admiration, is a joy daily kindled afresh… I talk out of the -fullness of life; it belongs to me in a sense larger than that of ownership.”

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Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 121

“To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.”

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Auguste Rodin

Source: Art, 1912, Preface, p. 6-7

“One can never do anything so beautiful as nature.”

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Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 300

“Michelangelo, revealed me to myself, revealed to me the truth of forms. I went to Florence to find what I possessed in Paris and elsewhere, but it is he who taught me this.”

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Auguste Rodin

Source: Rodin : the man and his art, with leaves from his notebook, 1917, p. 99

“In art a thing is beautiful whenever it has character. Character — this is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, whether beautiful or ugly. You may even call it a double truth. For it is the inner essence expressed by the outer appearance. It is the soul, the sentiment, the idea that shines out through the features of a fare, the pose and action of a human body, the tones of a skym the line of a horizon.”

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Auguste Rodin

Rodin on realism, 1910

“Slowness is a beauty”

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Auguste Rodin

Source: Auguste Rodin: The Man, His Ideas, His Works, 1905, p. 60

“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.”

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Auguste Rodin

Albert Edward Elsen (1985). The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin. p. 131
1930s and later

“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.”

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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
1930s and later

“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.”

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Auguste Rodin

Preface, p. 7-8
1910s, Art, 1912

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