Rodin has pronounced Rilke's essay the supreme interpretation of his work. A few years ago the sculptor expressed to the translators the wish that some day the book might be placed before the English-speaking public. The appreciation was published originally as one of a series of Art Monographs under the editorship of the late Richard Muther. To estimate and interpret the work of an artist is to be creatively just to him. For this reason there are fewer critics than there are artists, and criticism with but few exceptions is almost invariably negligible and futile.
In an intimate talk with his protégé, the sculptor offers candid, wide-ranging comments on the meaning of art; other famed artists; the relation of sculpture to poetry, painting, and music; more. 76 illustrations.
This definitive monograph from the Musée Rodin in Paris on the pioneering artist who paved the way for modern sculpture is now available in an affordable compact format. Revered today as the greatest sculptor of all time, whose expressive style prefigured that of the modernist movement and abstract sculpture, Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) stirred up much controversy during his lifetime, and his sculptures often met with hostility and incomprehension from his peers. This monograph traces the life and work of the artist, from his youth and early poverty-stricken years of apprenticeship to his most celebrated works—The Kiss, The Thinker, The Gates of Hell—which have become veritable icons; and from his passionate and tumultuous relationship with Camille Claudel to his extraordinary studio, working methods, and sources of inspiration, and his final years marked by war and illness. Written by experts from the Musée Rodin in Paris, this richly illustrated volume includes drawings, watercolors, engravings, and archival documents, as well as specially commissioned photographs of Rodin’s sculptures, completed by a chronology, bibliography, and history of the Musée Rodin—housed in the artist’s former studio in the Hôtel Biron. Providing insight into the many facets of his creative genius, this new compact edition of the Musée Rodin’s definitive reference on the artist and his oeuvre coincides with museum’s reopening in September 2015.
Winner of the 2016 Marfield Prize In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke—then a struggling poet in Germany—went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet.
Published to accompany an exhibition of sculptures and drawings by two of history's greatest artists. While examining the career of Auguste Rodin, the book discusses his debt to Michelangelo.
The sculpture of Auguste Rodin has become such an important part of our visual culture that it seems to have been with us always. The universal appeal of Rodin's work springs from its emotional expressiveness, its astonishingly lifelike vitality, and its passionate mirroring of the human condition. With his impressionistic technique, supported by a complete mastery of anatomical structure, Rodin overthrew the reigning academic precepts of finish and symmetry. By developing subjects beyond traditional allegories, he pointed the way to sheer abstraction in the twentieth century. This handsomely illustrated catalogue publishes for the first time in its entirety a major American collection of sculpture, the Cantor gifts to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and provides a rich context for Rodin's own work. It presents sculpture by Rodin's most important nineteenth-century forerunners--Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, François Rude, and others--as well as work by the contemporaries he admired, those with whom he competed, those he influenced, and those who moved from his orbit to develop their own styles at the dawn of the twentieth century. But the centerpiece of the book remains Rodin: forty-two works by the most influential sculptor of the modern period, all specially photographed and many shown in multiple views. -- Publisher description.
