Auguste Rodin

When I was quite young, as far back as I remember, I drew, but the gift is nothing without the will to make it worth while. The artist must have the patience of water that eats away the rock drop by drop.

I admit, that the commonplace man can never, by copying, produce a masterpiece; he notes every detail but he does not really see - the artist penetrates below the surface into the very heart of nature; for him everything is beautiful because beauty in art consists of character.

In art a thing is beautiful whenever it has character. Character — this is the intense truth of any natural spectacle, whether beautiful or ugly. You may even call it a double truth. For it is the inner essence expressed by the outer appearance. It is the soul, the sentiment, the idea that shines out through the features of a fare, the pose and action of a human body, the tones of a skym the line of a horizon.

Art is contemplation. It is the pleasure of the mind which searches into nature and which there divines the spirit by which Nature herself is animated. It is the joy of the intellect which sees clearly into the Universe and which recreates it, with conscientious vision. Art is the most sublime mission of man, since it is the expression of thought seeking to understand the world and to make it understood.

I am pervaded by the marvel of this art; but I cannot as yet explain it to myself. The Gothic is the world foreshortened. Where am I to begin? For more than thirty years I have been accumulating and comparing my observations. Perhaps eventually I shall succeed in deducing the rule, the law of divine intelligence; but perhaps I shall not have sufficient time. Then it will be the task of another, younger than myself, who will start his researches earlier, and who, besides, will have been informed by me.

My principles are the laws of experience.

To produce good sculpture it is not necessary to copy the works of antiquity; it is necessary first of all to regard the works of nature, and to see in those of the classics only the method by which they have interpreted nature.

I am not a rhetorician, but a man of action.

Or he may study the hidden mind of the animal. A mixture of feelings and of thoughts, of dumb intelligences and of rudimentary affections, he reads the whole humble moral life of the beast in its eyes and in its movements. He is even the confidant of nature. The trees, the plants talk to him like friends. The old gnarled oaks speak to him of their kindliness for the human race whom they protect beneath their sheltering branches. The flowers commune with him by the gracious swaying of their stalks, by the singing tones of their petals — each blossom amidst the grass is a friendly word addressed to him by nature.

Art, moreover, is taste. It is the reflection of the artist's heart upon all the objects that he creates. It is the smile of the human soul upon the house and ui>on the furnishing. It is the charm of thought and of sentiment embodied in all that is of use to man. But how many of our contemporaries fed the necessity of taste in house or furnishing? Formerly, in old France, Art was everywhere. The smallest bourgeois, even the peasant, made use only of articles which pleased the eye. Their chairs, their tables, their pitchers and their pots were beautiful. Today Art is banished from daily life. People say that the useful need not be beautiful. All is ugly, all is made in haste and without grace by stupid machines. The artist is regarded as an antagonist. Ah, my dear Gsell, you wish to jot down an artist's musings. Let me look at you! You really are an extraordinary man!"

But when a great artist or a great writer lays hold upon either sort of ugliness he transfigures it instantaneously. With a touch from the magic ring he metamorphoses it into beauty. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. His Is a sort of fairy alchemy. When Velasquez, paints Sebastian, King Philip's dwarf, he gives him such an appealing look that we read the poor creature's secret and see the tragedy it involved — a man forced to get his living by discarding his human dignity, and becoming a toy, a living joke. The more poignant his martyrdom, within that misshapen body, the more beautiful the artist's work.
When Millet paints a poor rustic leaning upon a hoe, a wretch broken by fatigue, scorched by the sun, degraded as a beast of the field, he has only to add an expression of resignation in order to make this hideous nightmare a magnificent symbol of humanity. When Shakespeare gives us Tago or Richard III, and when Racine gives us Néron and Narcisse, moral ugliness, interpreted by minds so clear, so penetrating, becomes a marvelous theme of beauty.

Were this thoroughly understood, industrial art would be entirely revolutionized — industrial art, that barbarous term, an art which concerns itself with commerce and profit.

An artist must possess consummate technique in order to make us forget it.