The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin
When I first visited the Museé Rodin in Paris at the age of twenty-five, having up till then only seen one bronze in a Bond Street gallery, I was overwhelmed. Rilke said: “Paris is a heavy, heavy city, a city of anxiety… to it all Rodin stands as a great, peaceful, powerful contradiction”. Rilke was twenty-seven when he went to Rodin’s studio in Meudon, and wrote of “a veritable army of works.... this purity and vehemence of expression, this inexhaustibility, this youth… unparalleled in the history of man”. Rodin told him “When people learned to despise those who do the real work, the whole concept of art was lost. Artists especially are no longer workers in the proper sense.... and none has any patience. But that is everything: patience and work”. Rilke wanted to make Rodin’s credo “Il faut travailler tojours” (one must always work) his own, but doubted: “Can I ever do it?”
Rodin was then in his sixties, and at the height of his powers, working on The Gates of Hell, but also, always, on many other things, experimenting, drawing, making plaster maquettes… In many of Rodin’s sculptures there is a restlessness.... which one can only call “modern”, that is, an element entering into art in Europe from the Renaissance onwards, and predominating more and more. Yet in some of his pieces one can feel and sense his search for stillness- for example, in those sculptures in which a figure emerges out of a rock, like us…unfinished.
There was a major exhibition of sculptures and drawings by Auguste Rodin, including The Kiss, 1900–4, shown here, at the Royal Academy, October 2006 to January 2007.
