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Lot Essay
This work will be included in the forthcoming Auguste Rodin catalogue critique de l'oeuvre sculpté currently being prepared by the Comité Auguste Rodin at Galerie Brame et Lorenceau under the direction of Jérôme Le Blay under the archive number 2017-5260B.
L'âge d'airain was originally conceived in 1877 and is widely considered Auguste Rodin's first great work, ranking alongside his later masterpieces such as the Porte de l'Enfer, Le Penseur and Le baiser. In late 1875 Rodin travelled from Brussels, where he had been living since 1871, to tour Italy. He visited Turin, Genoa, Rome and Naples, but the highlight of his trip was the week he spent in Florence, studying the sculpture of Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel. With these lessons in mind he returned to Brussels and resumed work on his plaster model for L'âge d'airain which he had begun the previous June. He based the figure's features on those of Auguste Neyt, a young Belgian soldier, who worked with Rodin for eighteen months, until the sculpture was finished in December 1876.
When Rodin first exhibited a bronze and a plaster version of L'âge d'airain in 1877 at the Cercle Artistique in Brussels, he caused a scandal: the new scrutiny of reality that he brought to the field of sculpture was so extreme, the sense of modelling so observed, that he was accused of casting a live person. His anticipated breakthrough was therefore to some extent delayed by these accusations, despite his submitting photographs of Neyt, as proof of his own work. Neyt was an apt model for L'âge d'airain, which took its name from the Age of Bronze mentioned by Hesiod as peopled with war-like men, a theme particularly keenly felt in France in the wake of its invasion by Prussia seven years earlier. The accusation was such an affront to Rodin's integrity, and so jeopardized his future reputation at the Salon, that he was compelled to request that a state committee of inquiry investigate the charges when he exhibited the plaster again in the 1880 Salon. The officials found in his favour, and the plaster was duly purchased by the state at the conclusion of the Salon and a bronze cast placed in the Jardin de Luxembourg in 1884.
Amongst those who saw the sculpture, Rodin found many defenders among the avant garde, later recalling that L'âge d'airain was 'condemned by the professors, while the students, connoisseurs and independent spirits loved it' (Rodin, quoted in F.V. Grunfeld, Rodin: A Biography, New York, 1998, pp. 103-104). The novel vitality of this figure of an all-too-believably human model rather than the idealised figures favoured by many academic sculptors was combined with Rodin's formidable talents to astounding effect, and paved the way for his reputation, established only a few years later, as the only rival to Michelangelo. In fact, while Michelangelo was an influence on him, as is clear even in the contrapposto evident in this work, during his trip to Italy the previous year, Rodin had also been struck by the Renaissance masters of bronze, and in particular Donatello.
It is a reflection of the importance of the L'âge d'airain motif in Rodin's work that casts of it are held by museums throughout the world; Alexis Rudier casts such as the present lot feature in the collections of the Musée Rodin, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, the Albright-Knowx Gallery, Buffalo and the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm and Philadelphia's Rodin Museum, amongst others.
L'âge d'airain was originally conceived in 1877 and is widely considered Auguste Rodin's first great work, ranking alongside his later masterpieces such as the Porte de l'Enfer, Le Penseur and Le baiser. In late 1875 Rodin travelled from Brussels, where he had been living since 1871, to tour Italy. He visited Turin, Genoa, Rome and Naples, but the highlight of his trip was the week he spent in Florence, studying the sculpture of Michelangelo in the Medici Chapel. With these lessons in mind he returned to Brussels and resumed work on his plaster model for L'âge d'airain which he had begun the previous June. He based the figure's features on those of Auguste Neyt, a young Belgian soldier, who worked with Rodin for eighteen months, until the sculpture was finished in December 1876.
When Rodin first exhibited a bronze and a plaster version of L'âge d'airain in 1877 at the Cercle Artistique in Brussels, he caused a scandal: the new scrutiny of reality that he brought to the field of sculpture was so extreme, the sense of modelling so observed, that he was accused of casting a live person. His anticipated breakthrough was therefore to some extent delayed by these accusations, despite his submitting photographs of Neyt, as proof of his own work. Neyt was an apt model for L'âge d'airain, which took its name from the Age of Bronze mentioned by Hesiod as peopled with war-like men, a theme particularly keenly felt in France in the wake of its invasion by Prussia seven years earlier. The accusation was such an affront to Rodin's integrity, and so jeopardized his future reputation at the Salon, that he was compelled to request that a state committee of inquiry investigate the charges when he exhibited the plaster again in the 1880 Salon. The officials found in his favour, and the plaster was duly purchased by the state at the conclusion of the Salon and a bronze cast placed in the Jardin de Luxembourg in 1884.
Amongst those who saw the sculpture, Rodin found many defenders among the avant garde, later recalling that L'âge d'airain was 'condemned by the professors, while the students, connoisseurs and independent spirits loved it' (Rodin, quoted in F.V. Grunfeld, Rodin: A Biography, New York, 1998, pp. 103-104). The novel vitality of this figure of an all-too-believably human model rather than the idealised figures favoured by many academic sculptors was combined with Rodin's formidable talents to astounding effect, and paved the way for his reputation, established only a few years later, as the only rival to Michelangelo. In fact, while Michelangelo was an influence on him, as is clear even in the contrapposto evident in this work, during his trip to Italy the previous year, Rodin had also been struck by the Renaissance masters of bronze, and in particular Donatello.
It is a reflection of the importance of the L'âge d'airain motif in Rodin's work that casts of it are held by museums throughout the world; Alexis Rudier casts such as the present lot feature in the collections of the Musée Rodin, Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, the Albright-Knowx Gallery, Buffalo and the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm and Philadelphia's Rodin Museum, amongst others.