Synopsis
Auguste Rodin, the most famous artist in the world at the turn of the 20th century, led a life as sensational and intense as the great sculptures he created. An accomplished Rodin scholar draws on closely guarded archives and letters to disentangle the facts from the many myths. 150 illus.
Reviews
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), the sculptor whose Balzac , Victor Hugo and The Thinker were part of a grandiose hymn to male genius, was obsessed with female anatomy and the physical basis of sexuality, as his thousands of erotic female nude drawings make clear. Drawing on archival sources, Butler, art professor at the University of Massachusetts, illuminates Rodin's heroic quest and his relationships with women in this detailed, richly illustrated biographical study. Overwhelmed by grief at the death in 1862 of his older sister, Maria, Rodin, suggests Butler, relived an oedipal attachment to her through his obsessive love for his protege, Camille Claudel. Meanwhile, he treated his common-law wife Marie-Rose Beuret as a "desexualized mother" who tended his hearth. Claudel went mad after Rodin reneged on his promise to marry her, but Butler challenges the standard image of Rodin as a male chauvinist, arguing that willful, ambitious Claudel "tyrannized" Rodin and imagined herself replacing him as France's preeminent sculptor. Butler portrays a titan hiding anger and lifelong loneliness beneath his immense charm.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
An insightful life of Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) that's based on many previously unpublished letters and a fresh interpretation of familiar facts. Butler (Art/UMass at Boston) is especially perceptive about Rodin's relationships--how they inspired, energized, and influenced his art--particularly his relations with the women to whom he claimed he ``owed everything'': his sister, who died when he was 21; his companion of 51 years, Rose Beuret, whom his biographer, Judith Cladel, arranged for him to marry when they were both near death; Camille Claudel, the student whom he reputedly drove mad; wealthy married women who commissioned portraits; and dozens of models who inspired and posed for his thousands of frenetic erotic drawings. Returning to France from Brussels, where he'd began his career, Rodin stopped in Florence, where he encountered the grandeur of Michelangelo and was liberated from the Grecian academic style that prevailed in Paris. This new, more natural, and somewhat vulgar style, as well as the artist's own demanding nature, accounted for his alienation from the centers of power in the artistic community, especially from the Salon system. Nonetheless, in an age of ``statuemania,'' of nationalism and public art, Rodin created major icons: The Kiss, The Thinker, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gate of Hell, the sublime portals based on Dante and cast for a museum that was never built. Butler's special strengths are in analyzing the politics of the artistic community and the art of politics; the expensive and collaborative nature of sculpture (the space, technology, and immense amount of assistance that Rodin required); Rodin's entrepreneurial dimension; his neglect of his illegitimate son; his fame abroad (Rilke wrote his first biography) but his equivocal position in France; and his loneliness. Like Rodin's art: simplified but rounded; monumental. (Two hundred photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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