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I invent nothing, I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art ; they take that for… - Auguste Rodin
" "I invent nothing, I rediscover. And the thing seems new because people have generally lost sight of the aim and the means of art ; they take that for an innovation which is nothing but a return to the laws of the great sculpture of long ago. Obviously, I think ; I like certain symbols, I see things in a synthetic way, but it is nature that gives me all that. I do not imitate the Greeks ; I try to put myself in the spiritual State of the men who hâve left us the antique statues. The 'Ecole' copies their works ; the thing that signifies is to recover their method. I began by showing close studies from nature like The Age of Brass. Afterwards I came to understand that art required a little more largeness, a little exaggeration, and my whole aim, from the time of the Burghers, was to find a method of exaggerating logically : that method consists in the deliberate amplification of the modelling. It consists also in the constant reduction of the figure to a geometrical figure, and in the determination to sacrifice any part of a figure to the synthesis of its aspect. See what the Gothic sculptors did. Look at the cathedra! of Chartres ; one of the towers is massive and without ornament : they sacrificed it to give value to the exquisite delicacy of the other tower.
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About Auguste Rodin
François-Auguste-René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917) was a French sculptor, and the preeminent sculptor of the modern era. He played a pivotal role in the art of the late nineteenth century, both excelling at and rebelling against the Beaux-Arts tradition.
Also Known As
Alternative Names:
Rodan
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Ogi︠u︡st Roden
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François Auguste René Rodin
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René François Auguste Rodin
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august rodin
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rodin
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a. rodin
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rodin auguste
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rodin a.
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aug. rodin
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e. rodin
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Lo-tan
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Roden Rone Fransua Ogyust
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François-Auguste-René Rodin
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Rodin
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François Auguste Rodin
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Francois A. Rene Rodin
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Additional quotes by Auguste Rodin
The landscape painter, perhaps, goes even further. It is not only in living beings that he sees the reflection of the universal soul; it is in the trees, the bushes, the valleys, the hills. What to other men is only wood and earth appears to the great landscapist like the face of a great being. Corot saw kindness abroad in the trunks of the trees, in the grass of the fields, in the mirroring water of the lakes. But there Millet read suffering and resignation.
Everywhere the great artist hears spirit answer to his spirit. Where, then, can you find a more religious man?
Does not the sculptor perform his act of adoration when he perceives the majestic character of the forms that he studies? — when, from the midst of fleeting lines, he knows how to extricate the eternal type of each being? — when he seems to discern in the very breast of the divinity the immutable models on which all living creatures are moulded? Study, for example, the masterpieces of the Egyptian sculptors, either human or animal figures, and tell me if the accentuation of the essential lines does not produce the effect of a sacred hymn. Every artist who has the gift of generalizing forms, that is to say, of accenting their logic without depriving them of their living reality, provokes the same religious emotion; for he communicates to us the thrill he himself felt before the immortal verities.
Art, 1912
Now, to the great artist, everything in nature has character; for the unswerving directness of his observation searches out the hidden meaning of all things. And that which is considered ugly in nature often presents more character than that which is termed beautiful, because in the contractions of a sickly countenance, in the lines of a vicious face, in all deformity, in all decay, the inner truth shines forth more clearly than in features that are regular and healthy.
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