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Auguste Rodin Quotes

1840–1917 France

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.

France
Sculptors

Also known as: Rodin

Random Auguste Rodin quote

42 quotes

No sudden inspiration can replace the long years of arduous labor necessary to train the eye to observe, the hand to reproduce.

Nobody does good to men with impunity.

The streets of Paris, with their shops of old furniture, etchings, and works of art, are a veritable museum, far less tiring than official museums, and from which one imbibes just as much as one can.

Now color — it is to this remark that I wished to lead — is the flower of fine modelling. These two qualities always accompany each other, and it is these qualities which give to every masterpiece of the sculptor the radiant appearance of living flesh.

I obey nature, I never presume to command her. The first principal in art is to copy what one sees.

Painting, literature, music, are more closely allied than the public usually admit. They are merely different means of expression.

The biblical times have come back again, the great invasions of the Medes and the Persians. Has the world, then, reached the point where it deserves to be punished for the egotistical epicureanism in which it has slumbered?

Patience is also a form of action.

to Rodin in: Leonard William Doob (1990)

The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who calls attention to his style, is like the farmer who devotes his energies to polishing farm implements and never uses them.

The sculptor must learn to reproduce the surface, which means all that vibrates on the surface: spirit, soul, love, passion — life. ... Sculpture is thus the art of hollows and mounds, not of smoothness, or even polished planes.

The artist who parades his drawing, the writer who wishes to attract praise to his style, resemble the soldier who plumes himself on his unif onn but refuses to go into battle, or the farmer who polishes the ploughshare instead of driving it into the earth.

If in looking at a picture you have been profoundly moved by it, but have not noticed the color or drawing, you may be sure that they are technically perfect.

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.

A critic recently denounced my Victor Hugo, declaring the treatment belonged not to sculpture but to music. He said it reminded him of a symphony by Beethoven. Heaven grant that he spoke the truth!

I am not at their orders, but at those of Nature! My confreres doubtless have their reasons for working as you have said. But in thus doing violence to nature and treating human beings like puppets, they run the risk of producing lifeless and artificial work...

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.

There are things that other people do not see: unknown depths, the wellsprings of life... There is grace in elegance; above grace, there is modelling; everything is exaggerated; we call it soft but it is most powerfully soft! Words fail me then.

To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.

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.

Of course, there is drawing in art as there is style in literature. Style that is mannered, that strains after effect, is bad. No style is good except that which effaces itself in order to concentrate all the attention of the reader upon the subject treated, upon the emotion rendered.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Auguste Rodin (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.