Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin was rejected three times by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, was accused of casting his first major sculpture from a live model, and is now treated as the point where modern sculpture begins. He spent twenty years doing decorative work for other people, including under Carrier-Belleuse in Brussels, and was thirty-seven when The Age of Bronze was exhibited and the surface was so convincing that the state investigated whether he had moulded it directly from a body. The accusation was refuted and made his name. In 1880 he was commissioned to make bronze doors for a museum of decorative arts, and The Gates of Hell occupied him for the remaining thirty-seven years of his life; the museum was never built, the doors were never cast in his lifetime, and the figures he developed for them - The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shades - became independent works and among the most reproduced sculptures in the world. His Balzac, commissioned in 1891 and refused by the writers' society that ordered it, is a shapeless dressing-gowned column that Steichen photographed by moonlight and that Rodin said was the sum of his life. He kept Camille Claudel as assistant, model and lover for a decade; she was a sculptor of great gifts, the relationship destroyed her, and her family had her committed for the last thirty years of her life. He left everything to the French state. He married Rose Beuret in 1917 after fifty-three years together and both died within months. The Musee Rodin in Paris was created from his bequest and is one of the few museums funded entirely by sales of its own casts. Claudel s reputation has been substantially recovered since the 1980s.

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