The Thinker by Auguste Rodin - Essay Example

The Thinker by Auguste Rodin Le Penseur (1880; The Thinker) Man is the towering masterpiece of God's creation. A man is able to do something out of something that already exists, he fashions it in a manner by which he always consider the kind of material that exist; but everything is possible, and every idea can be freely conceived if you create something out of nothing like what God have done. In every dispensation there is one person that stands out. A genius is born. He may face consequences but is not hindered by a status of life neither by lack of resources. Many successful persons rose from a poor family, in fact there are people, who in their lack of resources, thrived to achieve their goals and aspirations in life. One of them is Franois-Auguste-Ren Rodin, popularly known as Auguste Rodin. He was a French sculptor, an artist with a sharp eye. His arts echoed until these days. He fashioned his works meticulously and looked at the details. Thus he was honored as the leading sculptor of the late 19th and early 20th century. He combined and artistically manipulated his works with detailed textures and modeling associating the vast emotions of man. He was born and bred in a city known for its learning and knowledge legacy - Paris - on November 12, 1840 and died on November 17, 1917, buried at Meudon, near Paris. He studied drawing on a free school at age 13. In 1857, he attempted to enter the cole des Beaux-Arts but he failed three competitive examinations. The following year he decided to delve into doing decorative stonework. And in 1862, her sister Marie died, which caused him great troubles and afflictions. He tried to enter the church but it was fate that brought him to met Rose Beuret in 1864 who became his life companion. Formally they were not joined by the matrimony of marriage until a few weeks before her death in February 1917; she was 53 years old then. The same year when he met Rose Beuret, he became an apprentice to the sculptor A.-E. Carrier-Belleuse. His first submission to the official Salon exhibition in 1864, The Man with the Broken Nose, was rejected. Most of the portrait studies of Rodin were patterned from Rose Beuret. It must have been Rodin's great love for her. In 1871, he went with Carrier-Belleuse to work on decorations for public monuments in Brussels. Carrier-Belleuse was not satisfied with his work thus dismissing him. Soon, Rodin collaborated on the accomplishment of decorative bronzes, and Beuret joined him in Brussels. The rejection probably had made him to realize he needed to develop a style of his own. It was consummated after four years; he developed his own styles because he was urged to produce innovative and decorative works. In the midst of this innovation, He toured to five cities of Italy: Genoa, Florence, Rome, Naples, and Venice before returning to Brussels. Italy has been the cradle of Renaissance art. He saw the works of Michelangelo and Donatello, amazed with their works; he was inspired to create such fine works as Michelangelo and Donatello, bringing the emphasis on the muscle works and human emotions. He produced his first original work molded in bronze, The Vanquished, depicting painful expressions of a physically overpowered man seeking for rejuvenation. Scandals arose in his exhibition in Brussels and at the Paris Salon of The Age of Bronze in 1877. People did not believe that he made such realistic work and he was charged of casting it from a living person. His former master heard that he went back to Paris in 1879, Carrer-Belleuse asked him for designs. After much controversies and rejections, he was granted a payment and appointed to make a statue for the City Hall in Paris. He gained his reputation as a sculptor in 1880 with the success of his sculptures: The Age of Bronze and St. John the Baptist Preaching. The same year he modeled The Gates of Hell, the sculptured bronze door for the Muse des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris. The door incorporates scenes from The Inferno. It was made through the inspiration of Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. Though Rodin was not able to finish The Gates of Hell, he left models for most sculpture parts. Most of his works varied greatly in two styles: deliberate roughness of form and a careful and detailed surface modeling; the other is marked by a polished surface and subtleness of form. His sculptures are realistic. He contributed painstaking works in preserving his masterpieces. The Thinker was conceived during the Romanticism era. His work had great emphasis on human drama and conflict. The Thinker best describe an expressionistic piece, the position is somewhat unnatural. The Thinker may have drowned to his deep stream of consciousness. It was conceived in 1880 and was enlarged between 1902 and 1904 in Bronze. It was casted in 1925 by Alexis Rudier in Paris. Its size is 79 x 51 1/4 x 55 1/4 inches (200.7 x 130.2 x 140.3 cm) which stands in Stanford's Rodin Sculpture Garden, on the south side of the Cantor Center (Sanford, 2002). The piece was originally intended to be a headdress of the Gates of Hell, a monumental sculptural entrance to the Muse des Arts Dcoratifs in Paris. There are 21 casts existing nowadays. B. Gerald Cantor, an art collector, donated Stanford one of them in 1988. The Stanford University brags its five percent possession of the sculpture. The Thinker provoked intense reactions from the press. Gabriel Mourey, the editor of the magazine Les Arts de la vie, launched a subscription for a bronze "offered to the people of Paris... (Le Normand-Romain, 2003)." It is remarkable because this was Rodin's first work to be erected in a public place as a socialist symbol after its dedication in the anterior of the Pantheon on April 21, 1906 during intense political and social crises. But this statue hindered ceremonies, so in 1922, it was transported with its pedestal to the garden of the Htel Biron, which is now popularly known as the Rodin Museum. The piece is apparently naked, as many of his pieces were; the artist probably desired to preserve a heroic figure la Michelangelo to embody thinking as well as poetry. It was only in 1930 that Martin Heidegger, an influential German philosopher, analyzed and formulated the equation in Rodin's work as The Thinker as Poet (Phelan, 2001). Rodin depicted two arts in one masterpiece, poetry and art. He made not only the people who conceived his work to think but The Thinker itself. The Philadelphia Museum of Art contributed a recorded audio of Rodin's intent for his famous masterpiece, and it says - "A naked man seated upon a rock, his feet drown under him, his fist against his teeth. He dreams. What makes my thinker think is that he thinks not only with his brain, with his knitted brow, his distended nostrils and compressed lips, but with every muscle of his arms, back, and limbs, with his clenched fist, and gripping toes. The fertile thoughts slowly elaborate itself within his brain. He is no longer dreamer; he is creator (Rodin)." The Thinker was first exhibited in the U.S. at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. The bronze statue is the only known cast finished from what is called the "lost-wax" method. The Thinker was a gift to the City of Louisville and was placed in its current setting in 1949 thus becomes the university symbol, an icon of intellect. Shortly before he died, he donated the entire collection of his own works including all art objects he had acquired to the French government in 1916. Rodin was in fact, a real artist. He produced clay, plaster, marble and bronze sculptures in his entire life. Auguste Rodin The Thinker References Phelan, Joseph. "Who is Rodin's Thinker." Aug. 2001. Art Encyclopedia The Guide To Great Art Online. 16 Apr. 2008 . "Rodin Museum." 1997. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Audio Transcript. 16 Apr. 2008 . Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette. "Around the Gates of Hell." 07 Jul. 2003. The Muse Rodin. 16 Apr. 2008 . "The Purdue OWL Family of Sites." 26 Aug. 2005. The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. 23 April 2006 . Strunk, William Jr. and E.B. White. "The Elements of Style." 4th ed. Massachusetts: ALLYN & BACON A Pearson Education Company, 2000, 1979. Barnet, Sylvan. "A Short Guide to Writing About Art." Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981. "Rodin's Masterpiece, The Thinker, arrives at the ROM." 16 Aug. 2001. Royal Ontario Museum. 16 Apr. 2008 . Sanford, John. "Rodin's The Thinker returns to Stanford campus after a year abroad." 01 Oct. 2002. Stanford University: News Release. 16 Apr. 2008 < http://news-service.stanford.edu/pr/02/thinker102.html>. "The Thinker." 2001. University of Louisville. 16 Apr. 2008 . Rodin, Auguste. Encyclopdia Britannica. "Ultimate Reference Suite." Chicago:Encyclopdia Britannica, 2008. Read More