Auguste Rodin, Despair, Conceived 1886-1887, this example modelled c.1900

‘Every part of the human figure is expressive. And is not an artist always isolating, since in nature nothing is isolated’.

Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) famed for works such as The Thinker and The Kiss, is widely lauded as the father of modern sculpture. Diverging from the classical idealism and formulaic themes explored by his contemporaries, Rodin’s focus on individual character and emotion imbued his work with a naturalism unmatched for his time. Indeed, with their vitality, animation, and intensity his pieces are considered to have shaped the future of sculpture and defined the modern age. As David J. Getsy observes, Rodin has been hailed as ‘transforming a medium that had been previously understood as primarily one of public and civic address to one that was more readily apparent as a vehicle for the expression of the subjective, the emotive, and the personal’. Rodin's works were inspired by classical Greek and Renaissance art, albeit he pared back narrative references to classical gods and muses by sculpting naturalistic figures whose forms reflect distinctly modern representations of love and desire, anguish and contemplation. The Gothic architectural details of French medieval cathedrals also held a significant role in Rodin’s artistic development, conscious as he was of his position as an inheritor and transmitter of the Western artistic tradition – and centred, for Rodin, on contributing to his nation’s heritage. His examination of French sculpture through successive eras displayed an eclectic approach, and was one that emphasised a great appreciation of his predecessors’ place in history. A trip to Italy in 1876 was a decisive influence on the way he later viewed his role as an artist and a sculptor, with his response to the works of Michelangelo liberating him from the tethers of academicism. The literary works of the Italian poet, writer, and philosopher Dante Alighieri (1265-1321), whose epic poem the Divine Comedy and its third realm Inferno (c. 1320), however, gave rise to Rodin's most famous creation – The Gates of Hell (c. 1880-1917), out of which The Kiss (1882) and The Thinker (1904) were also formed. Rodin’s success during his lifetime was such that he achieved a level of fame and international popularity that was unprecedented for a sculptor.

Rodin’s contemporary success did not come without controversy, although one such episode was to become a defining period in his career. The Age of Bronze (1876) scandalised the art world, with some critics suspicious of Rodin’s methods because this breakout piece was so true to life. The sculpture depicts a moment of awakening – to suffering or to joy – and was sculpted over the course of eighteen months. However, Rodin’s rendering of his model, Auguste Neyt, was so accurate that he faced accusations of fraud. Such questions of authenticity, naturally, are testament to what has been described as Rodin’s sublime talent. Subsequently, he was left with little choice but to vigorously deny the charges of casting from a living model, which he was able to disprove due to the photographic records he kept of his studio. Interest in Rodin’s work followed, resulting in the purchase of The Age of Bronze by the then Under Secretary of Fine Arts, Edmund Turquet, whose implicit patronage and subsequent friendship propelled Rodin and his sculptures into the spotlight. The Kiss also faced a degree of critical censure. For conservative critics, Rodin’s entwined lovers were viewed as problematic because they were seen to depict uncontrolled carnal desire, illicit in its nature and explicit in sexual infatuation – based as it was on the characters of Paulo and Francesca from the Divine Comedy, who were punished for their transgressions and doomed to wander eternally through the corridors of Hell. Yet as an article from 1883 demonstrates The Kiss was also reviewed positively. In her assessment of Rodin and his sculpture, Julia Cartwright was quick to comment with great enthusiasm that his handling of the subject matter ‘places his work on a pinnacle apart’. Cartwright continued by suggesting that in his representation of ‘the very instant of the kiss’ she was affected by ‘such a union of purity and passion, of lofty art and intense humanity’. The Kiss continues to elicit various readings, and its status today as a cultural icon is such that it remains one of his most recognised and reproduced sculptures alongside The Thinker.

Rodin’s growing reputation was confirmed further when Turquet commissioned him in 1880 to create a set of bronze doors for a newly envisioned decorative arts museum in Paris. The museum was never realised, but this commission lay the foundation for Rodin’s greatest collection of work in The Gates of Hell and which some have considered to be his vindication. Even after the plans for the museum were abandoned Rodin continued to develop figures piecemeal over a period of thirty-seven years. This portal of the dammed became an active site for Rodin’s extensive reconsideration of sculptural practice and an interrogation of making and remaking his works. This monumental masterpiece eventually comprised over two hundred and twenty five writhing, entangled bodies and groups, and was inspired by Rodin’s interpretation of Dante’s Inferno and Michelangelo’s fresco of the Last Judgement. At the time of his death The Gates of Hell existed only in plaster, with the present figure reflecting an earlier version of Despair that was first conceived in 1886 and executed in around 1900. The artist would never see his magnum opus completed in bronze, with the process finished posthumously, but the sculptures Rodin created for The Gates of Hell were a vital source of inspiration across the rest of his career. For Julia Fischer the legacy of The Gates of Hell rests in Rodin’s ‘expressive manipulation of human anatomy’, with its composition providing an ‘arresting portrait of humanity’. Moreover, his embodiment of human experience and emotion is visceral in form and exposes the interiority of the self through the full force of feeling, with the effect reminiscent of the works of the Spanish painter and printmaker Franciso Goya (1746-1828). Despair is one of a ‘cacophony of human bodies’, who in their intense physicality and intricate forms appear to twist like vines in the margins of an illuminated manuscript.

The symbolism of Despair refers to the feeling of hopelessness Dante encounters in the Divine Comedy, documenting but one facet of individual, isolated, inner turmoil in Rodin’s elaborate study of affect and adversity. The full title of this piece is Despair from the Gates (Le Désespoir dit de la Porte), and depicts a nude female figure whose tightly coiled body sits in an unnatural stance as she strains to hold the foot of the leg that hides her face from view. The significance of the present example is the insight it offers into Rodin’s working methods, and the subsequent evolution of the sculpture’s contorted and restless position from the Despair we see here to its final similarly agonised posture. Indeed, John Berger likens Rodin’s figures in The Gates of Hell to ‘prisoners within their contours’ whose ‘invisible pressure inhibits and reduces every possible thrust outwards’, whilst Malcolm Ruel observes that ‘the hunched, crouching, essentially self-enclosing figure appears again and again in the Rodin oeuvre’. Given the inspiration behind The Gates of Hell, it is perhaps not surprising that we find Despair featured alongside the likes of Sorrow and Shame, Meditation, Thought, and Tenderness. These titles convey universal themes and intersect with Rodin’s rendering of other familiar states of mind, those found in, for example, desire, love, and grief. Whether viewed as individual pieces or as a collective work, the figures from The Gates of Hell are, as Ruel reminds us, representative of Rodin’s ‘Dante-esque commentary on the human condition’.

Rodin favoured traditional materials and as such employed his skills to bronze, marble and clay, but integral to his practice of sculpture was the use of plaster. Indeed, the current plaster of Despair reminds us that the very essence of a sculptor is to model, to mould, and to create, within which there are liminal spaces where the imaginative act of touching suggests an allure of transgression and desire. Rodin’s career was shaped by a relentless exploration of the human body with all of its flaws, resulting in his comparison by Berger to the Greek myth Pygmalion – who fell in love with his creation, wishing to animate her. However, according to Berger, Rodin represents an inversion of the original myth, in that his work perpetuates an ambivalence between the living and the created, the flesh and the clay. The significance Rodin placed as a sculptor on his relationship with plaster was evidenced in 1900 at the Pavillon de L’Alma in Paris, where he chose to reveal rather than conceal his creative process. Rodin positioned his plasters at the centre of this self-curated survey exhibition, purposefully foregrounding the impression of making, process, provisional form, and touch by way of the artist’s mark. Plaster was the default medium sculptors used before commissions to represent their work for public scrutiny and in this way can be viewed as something of a transitory material, meaning this present version of Despair is all the more striking due to its physical survival. The temporal nature of plaster has been insightfully discussed by Tabea Schindler, whose analysis of this medium emphasises its central role as a vessel of memory that in its materiality preserves the imprint of long absent artists, their revisions, and innovations. Thus as plaster was also the medium through which artists made creative experiments and discoveries, the present sculpture serves too as a testimony to a fleeting moment of originality and spontaneity. Importantly, though, from a symbolic embodied perspective, Despair perfectly represents what Getsy has characterised as Rodin’s distinct skill in rendering an ‘externalised passion, desire, and longing by making the straining, contorted, or fragmentary body manifest the effects of internal emotional states’.

Rodin’s contribution to art is such that his influence reaches far beyond his years and continues today. His body of work shows that his true gift to twentieth-century art was in his capacity ‘to express inner truths of the human psyche…He sculpted a universe of great passion and tragedy, a world of imagination that exceeded the mundane reality of everyday existence', through which he rendered the extreme physicality and breadth of emotional and psychological experience. Despair is an example of Rodin’s practice of fragmentation and when examined in detail evidences the breadth of his creative imagination, highlighting his status as the father of Modernism – and shown here in its original form. As Lisa Le Feuvre observes, Rodin’s interest was ‘in a sculpture that lived and breathed, critical and urgent subjects that are in and of the world’. Nowhere are these sentiments more evident than in The Gates of Hell, on which Despair is featured. In his timeless depiction of every recognisable human emotion, encounter, and interaction, Rodin captured a microcosm of humanity, not only as it once was, but as it is, and how it will be.

The present cast of Despair was a gift from Rodin to the French sculptor Charles Delanglade (1870-1952) in around 1900.

A bronze cast of the present version of Despair is held at the Rodin Museum, Paris. Other casts are in the collections of the Maryhill Museum of Art, Maryhill, and The Brooklyn Museum, New York, USA, as well as in the National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo, Japan. Other versions of Despair are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA, and in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Literature

Audeh, Aida, ‘Rodin’s Gates of Hell and Dante’s Inferno 7: Fortune, the Avaricious and Prodigal, and the Question of Salvation’, in Karl Fugelso (ed.), Studies in Medievalism XXII: Corporate Medievalism II (Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2013), pp. 115-137.

Berger, John, About Looking (London: Bloomsbury, [1980] 2009).

Boucher, Bruce, ‘Embodiments of Energy: Rodin’s Incessant Urge to Create and Animate’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 June 2021, pp. 15-16.

Bowman, Robert, Works by Rodin and Claudel (London: Bowman Sculpture, n.d).

Cartwright, Julia, ‘Francesca da Rimini’, Magazine of Art, 7 (1884), pp.137-139.

Elsen, Albert, The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin (Stanford: Standford University Press, 1985).

Fischer, Julia, ‘Eternal Truths Cast in Bronze: Rodin’s The Gates of Hell; August Rodin’s Unfinished Project is the Keystone to his Legacy as the Father of Modern Sculpture and an Arresting Portrait of Humanity’, Wall Street Journal, 4 August 2023.

Getsy, David. J, Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture (London: Yale University Press, 2010).

Hale, William Harlan, The World of Rodin, 1840-1917 (Amsterdam: Time-Life International, 1972).

Le Feuvre, Lisa, ‘ Hands Touching’, in Nabila Abdel Nabi et al (eds.), The EY Exhibition: The Making of Rodin (London: Tate Publishing, 2021), pp. 62-69.

Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette (ed.), The Bronzes of Rodin: Catalogue of Works in the Musée Rodin. 2 vols (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 2007).

Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette, ‘The Greatest of Living Sculptors’, in Catherine Lampert et al (eds.), Rodin (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2006), pp. 29-53.

Nabi, Nabila Abdel et al, ‘The Making of Rodin’, in Nabila Abdel Nabi et al (eds.), The EY Exhibition: The Making of Rodin (London: Tate Publishing, 2021), pp. 12-21.

Ruel, Malcolm, ‘Auguste Rodin and the Sacredness of the Self’, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, 29:2 (2009), pp. 4-9.

Schindler, Tabea, ‘Plaster as a Matter of Memory: Auguste Rodin and George Segal’, in Sarah Posman et al (eds.), The Aesthetics of Matter: Modernism, the Avante-Garde and Material Exchange (Berlin: De Gruyter, Inc, 2013), pp. 144-157.

Auguste Rodin 1840-1917

Cookie preferences

Join our mailing list

Auguste Rodin 1840-1917

Auguste Rodin 1840-1917

Further images

Provenance

Exhibitions

Publications