French Sculpture - RW Norton Art Gallery

European Gallery
European Gallery
Auguste Rodin (1840-1926) is arguably
Suzon
Auguste Rodin
1875
Jean D'Aire
Auguste Rodin
1884
Eternal Spring
Auguste Rodin
1884
The Kiss
Auguste Rodin
1898
one of the greatest sculptors the world has
ever known. He was rejected from the
Grand Ecole three times for, ironically, failing the sculpting exam. Though considered
a titan among French artists and so central
to Western art that only Michelangelo is
better known as a sculptor, Rodin struggled
to find success and was wholly unexhibited
for the first 30 years of his life.
His first commercially successful piece
was the bust of a young woman entitled
Suzon. At the time, he was working for the
premier decorative sculptor Albert Ernest
Carrier-Belleuse in his atelier or studio
in Belgium. Unfortunately, Rodin sold
the rights for unlimited editions of Suzon,
which put his sculpture in every household,
but very little money in his pocket.
In 1880, Rodin won a commision from
the mayor of Calais, who proposed a monument depicting the historical sacrifice of
six citizens during the Hundred Years War.
Rodin's design was controversial. He did
not present the burghers in a traditional
manner with a single hero or a rhetorical
gesture; rather all six men appeared sullen and worn. Each face of the six figure
momument suggests different stages of
unresolved inner struggles, as can plainly
be seen on the maquette of Jean D'Aire.
Rodin intended this psychological study to
remain on ground level where viewers may
have walked amongst the Burghers.
While Rodin had drawn and sculpted
nudes before, they lacked sensuality,
which would soon surface and become
the central hallmark of his work. The nude
figures shown in Eternal Spring were a
more conservative, academic approach and
provoked little critical excitement when
first exhibited, at least partially because
it was originally associated in the public
mind with two safely distant and idealized
mythological figures, rather than a real-life
adulterous couple, unlike The Kiss, which
caused tremendous controversy. Although
based on a story from Dante's Inferno, The
Kiss looks startlingly contemporary. These
were not neo-classical gods or nymphs;
these were a young man and young woman
engaged in naughtiness.
The Thinker
Auguste Rodin
1880
Fallen Caryatid
Carrying Her Stone
Auguste Rodin
1891
Head of a Young
Girl
Auguste Rodin
In 1880, Rodin was commissioned to sculpt
two huge doors which became his greatest work,
The Gates of Hell, which drew its inspiration
from Dante's Inferno. The pinnacle figure is
the eternal observer, the witness and judge of
mankind in its struggle with its own misshapen
desires. Poised at the very apex of the work, it is
arguably the most famous sculpture in the world:
The Thinker. Rodin originally intended this crown
piece to be Dante himself, looking over all the
sinners in hell.
The moment Rodin chose to replace Dante
with his image of The Thinker, The Gates of
Hell became his personalized vision of humanity
and fear. Rodin identified with The Thinker: the
thinker is an artist, and the artist is thoughtful
and can detach himself from the crowds and its
passions in order to reveal humanity to itself.
But, however Rodin may have seen him, critical interpretations of The Thinker have changed
over the years. Today, what was once seen as
a figure despairing at man's powerlessness has
now become a universal symbol of hope and
belief in man's resourcefulness. To Rodin, hell
was a condition of being without hope, but The
Thinker was always intended to sit just beyond
hell, regarding the fall that could be, yet retaining
the possibility of redemption.
The works that were permanent to the Gates
of Hell were about the pain of desire. One of the
most powerful of these was the Fallen Caryatid
Carrying Her Stone. The word "caryatid" originally referred to "women of Karyae," who were
enslaved by the Greeks after the Persian Wars.
The stone is a symbol of a caryatid's mental suffering, of the burden life condemned her to carry.
Note that the rock is left as raw marble in places.
Conservative critics chronically complained that
Rodin's works were left unfinished.
However, Rodin is considered a bridge between the romantics and the modernists. He was
beginning to divorce sculpture from the need for
meaning and in doing so, he prefigured modern
sculpture by producing work that celebrated form
while remaining free of narrative. In pieces like
Head of a Young Girl, we can see the concern
with the integrity of the medium that is a hallmark
of modernism; the stone is deliberately left raw in
places, the figure just emerging from the material
in a way that juxtaposes the delicacy of the face
with the reality of the stone.
The
19th Century
French Sculpture
Self Guided Tour
Lion Crushing a Serpent
Antoine Louis Barye
1832
In the late 18th century in France, young sculptors re-
ceived their training from the Royal Academy. After the
Revolution, it became known as the Ecole des Beaux Arts
which dominated their lives, controlling their education
with a tightly prescribed curriculum and establishing
hierarchies through which the artist slowly advanced
within the system from academician to professor to officer. Commissions were given based on the Academy
prestige of the individual artist. This system trained
scores of famous French artists while the Paris Salon
showcased their works. Some of the finest artists not
only trained in the Ecole, but also returned to instruct
the next generation of artists.
The R.W. Norton Art Gallery
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American History Gallery
Tapestry Gallery
Benjamin Franklin,
J.A. Houdon
1778
Gutenburg Page
Celestial Globe
George Washington
J.A. Houdon
1778
The Prisons
Marquis de Lafayette
Jules Dalou
1881
widely considered the foremost French
sculptor of the 18th century. He entered
the Ecole Royale de Sculpture at the
age of 12. After 8 years of study, he was
awarded the Prix de Rome, France’s top
prize, where the favored student is granted
the opportunity to study art in Italy at the
king’s expense. Houdon trained in Italy for
ten years, and returned to France where he
supported himself well on commissions.
He took an active part in teaching at the
Academy, and he was a chief contributor
to every Salon. Houdon sculpted busts of
most of the leading men of the day, and
worked on commissions for royalty. After
being cleared by the Convention during
the Reign of Terror, Houdon journeyed
to America to make busts of its most
important leaders, Benjamin Franklin and
George Washington.
ules Dalou (1838-1902) was considered
Rodin’s rival for the title of the greatest French sculptor of the 19th century.
Though born to a humble glovemaker,
Dalou was admitted to the Ecole des
Beaux-Arts, where he quickly came to
feel that the formalist limitations of the
academic style upon which the school
insisted stifled him artistically. Still, he
persevered, gaining a reputation as ambitious and hard-working, if also visibly
poorer than most of his classmates. Dalou
was completely against the Ecole after
failing to win the Prix de Rome, and when
he was offered a professorship there, he
turned it down. He frequently lamented,
“Whenever I do anything in my statuary
that is bad, I attribute it to what I learned
[in the Ecole].”
J
Tiger Devouring a Gavial
Antoine Louis Barye
1831
Lion Crushing Serpent
Antoine Louis Barye
1832
Lion Crushing Serpent,
detail
Antoine Louis Barye
1832
Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-
Lafayette et
Washington,
16th C.Bartholdi
Tapestry
Frederic
1904) was privately tutored in art in Paris
and began exhibiting at the Salon at the
age of 20, and did so for the next 50 years
until his death. Glorifying the historic past
with monuments was a principal subject of
19th century artists, as nostalgia for heroes
of the past pacified political unrest in the
present. Full scale editions of this work
are exhibited in both New York and Paris.
His most famous work rests in New York
Harbor: The Statue of Liberty.
Bonheur Gallery
Jules Pierre Mene (1810-1879) was
Les Animaliers were a group of art-
Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828) is
Jaguar Devouring Hare
Antoine Louis Barye
1848
ists, primarily sculptors in bronze, whose
works popularized images of animals
outside of a narrative or historical context. The father of this movement was
Antoine-Louis Barye (1796-1875), who
is considered an artistic bridge between
Neo-classicism and Romanticism, which
favored the individual and emotional and
moved away from narrative structure.
Born the son of a jeweler and conscripted into Napoleon’s last military
venture at the age of 16, Barye managed
to gain entry to the Ecole de Beaux Arts
where he competed unsuccessfully for the
Prix de Rome and the chance to study in
Italy. Though he continued to compete, he
won little, and needing to support himself
and his family, went to work for a jeweler
in 1823 where he spent the next eight years
making jewelry and small animal statues.
He became obsessed with wild animals
and began a self-study of various naturalists' works. Though he continued to submit
work, it wasn’t until 1831 that he had
another work accepted at the Salon, and
Tiger Devouring a Gavial was a sensation
and won a Second Place Medal.
He did well again in the Salon of 1833
with Lion Crushing a Serpent and received
his first commission for a public statue.
However, he was consistently attacked
by conservative critics who felt that his
“overly” naturalistic animals departed
from the classical models.
Even after he gained critical appreciation, he failed to succeed in business. In
1839 he borrowed money and established
his first workshop, issuing sales catalogues and overseeing the casting of his
models. Nonetheless, his perfectionism,
which made for good art, made for bad
business, and in 1848, he was forced to
declare bankruptcy, losing all of his models and tools to his creditors.
Fortunately, he was later given the position of Professor of Zoological Drawing
at the Museum of Natural History, and
eventually appreciation of his work led to
the award of the Legion of Honor.
Huntsman with Fox
Pierre Jules Mene
1879
Dog Licking his Paw
Pierre Jules Mene
born in Paris, the son of a prosperous
metal-turner. His father trained him in
metal-working techniques and the boy
quickly put them together with his own
natural talent for drawing and began creating small sculptures. The young Mene
never attended any well-known schools
and seems to have been largely self-taught
as an artist. Always an astute businessman, in 1837 Mene established the first
of what would be a series of foundries to
cast his sculptures. The following year,
he made his debut at the Paris Salon with
a piece called Dog and Fox. From that
point on, he regularly exhibited at the
Salon, eventually winning four awards.
He was extremely popular in England as
well as France. In 1861, his reputation was
secured by his induction into the Legion
d’Honneur.
Mene was also out-going and convivial
and his home became a gathering place for
painters, musicians, and fellow sculptors.
Consequently, he was far more popular
with potential purchasers than the perhaps
more artistically gifted Barye.
Rosa Bonheur (1822- 1899)
Reclining Bull
Rosa Bonheur
Ewe
Rosa Bonheur
was
popular largely because she painted and
sculpted in the style that became known
as “juste milieu” – in other words, a
middle ground that managed to combine
the innovations of romanticism with the
traditions of Neo-classicism.
Though the child of an artist, Rosa, as
a female, was not allowed to attend the
prestigious Ecole des Beaux Arts. Instead,
at the age of 14, she began training herself
by copying works at the Louvre and had
her first triumph at the Paris Salon, the
annual juried artistic competition, when
only 19 years old. Most of her early work
was based on the small menagerie her
father allowed her to keep in their sixth
floor apartment; she helped her brothers
Isidore and Auguste develop their own
artistic gifts in return for their help in
carrying her animal subjects up and down
the stairs.