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  Rodin saw the commission as an opportunity to prove himself as more than a mere decorator. Although the task required him to make ornamental doors, he would propose the most monumental doors Paris had ever seen: a twenty-foot-tall bronze gate with more than two hundred tiny nude figures inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. The idea had been simmering in his mind since he had seen Lorenzo Ghiberti’s bronze cathedral doors the Gates of Paradise in Italy, as well as Michelangelo’s series of half-carved slaves struggling to break free from their marble prisons. After Rodin had returned home he found himself rereading the Divine Comedy so often that he kept a copy tucked in his back pocket.

  The state accepted his design and awarded him eight thousand francs and a free studio in the government-owned Marble Depot. It wasn’t enough to allow him to quit his day job at a porcelain factory in Sèvres, where he would spend a decade manufacturing vases. But it marked the birth of the Gates of Hell, the project that would consume him for the rest of his life.

  Rodin’s Gates of Hell as later cast in bronze.

  STONE SLABS LITTERED THE grassy courtyard of the Marble Depot, some tipped over whole, others half carved, then discarded. The studio complex was situated between the Rue de l’Université and the edge of the Seine, on a sliver of land once known as the Isle of the Swans. The state sent the stone remains of deposed kings and damaged military monuments to the site, where they awaited conservation after the wars. Many languished there for so long that sculptors eventually salvaged them for parts.

  Rows of studios lining the perimeter of the courtyard were reserved for artists working on official state commissions. In 1880, Rodin moved into Studio M, which he shared with a younger artist, Joseph Osbach. As the Gates grew bigger and bigger over the years, he would take over Studio H and Studio J, too.

  Blocks of damp clay gave the studio a cold wet air. The only source of heat came from a small cast-iron stove. But it was a vast improvement over Rodin’s old studio in the stable and he set to work “with a fury.” The vision had been throbbing in his head “like an egg ready to hatch.” Now that the state had supplied him the chisel to crack open this cache of accumulating images, he began by bringing to life Ugolino, the starving father who gnawed the flesh off his own children in the lowest circle of hell, and the adulterous lovers Francesca and Paolo. He considered seating a Dante on a rock in front of the couple, but then decided that would be a too obvious reference to the text, which he didn’t want to slavishly illustrate.

  Instead of representing a famous figure, he opted to make it an anonymous man. He would situate him at the top of the Gates, with “his feet drawn under him, his fist against his teeth.” He would not be engaged in any heroic act; he would simply be thinking. “The fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He is no longer dreamer, he is creator,” Rodin said.

  Rather than beginning with the feet and working from the ground up, Rodin started with the torso. He roughed out a small C-shaped spinal curve in clay to get a sense of the muscular proportions. The right shoulder leaned down toward a raised thigh, mirroring the contours of Apollonios’s ancient Torso of Belvedere, the extraordinary marble fragment that sculptors have been copying since the Renaissance. Rodin then modeled increasingly detailed maquettes until he completed a twenty-seven-inch figure. In later years he had his plaster and bronze technicians triple it in size to seventy-nine inches.

  Rodin originally titled the figure The Poet, possibly after Dante or Baudelaire. (Rodin had drawn an early sketch of the sculpture in the margin of a Fleurs du Mal poem that told the story of a writer who sat on a rock trying to maintain his concentration while a woman wearing nothing but jewelry paraded her flesh before him.) Or Rodin may have meant the title in the ancient Greek sense of the word poïesis, which referred to the poet not merely as a verse writer, but as a kind of magician, philosopher, sculptor or any other creator.

  The Thinker, as Rodin ultimately renamed the figure, was in part a young sculptor’s exploration of what it looked like to be an artist. To Rodin, the artist was a laborer, and the sculpture paid homage to that struggle. The figure is so immersed in concentration that it bears down upon his entire body, burrowing into the trench of his brow, bowing his neck. His shoulders stoop like Atlas’s but the global burden he carries is that of his own head. A palm collapsed against his jaw, he does not speak; eyes cast down, he does not see the suffering all around him. While typical statuary glorified war heroes and aristocrats, this anonymous figure paid rare tribute to the common man. It was a prayer pose for the modern artist.

  The photographer Edward Steichen sealed the mythology of The Thinker as a self-portrait of Rodin a few years later with an image that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum. It shows Rodin standing before the sculpture with his own fist propped under his chin. The photo’s dark exposure blurs the boundaries between the man and the material, recasting them as persona and alter ego, rather than artist and creation. Shadows envelop the two figures from the neck down, as if their diaphanous bodies had gathered solely to support the weight of their mighty heads. Rilke later wrote that The Thinker’s “whole body has become head and all the blood in his veins has become brain.”

  Rodin mounted a version of The Thinker onto the fifteen-foot-tall wooden frame that would become The Gates of Hell. When visitors asked about the mass of wood taking up all the room in his studio, he would reply, “It is my door.” Often by candlelight, Rodin modeled its reliefs and figures in clay before attaching them to panels on the armature. He made them too small for anyone to question whether they were cast from life, but big enough to show off his figurative skills. He used his knowledge of Gothic architecture to arrange the wailing lost souls into sculptural configurations that manipulated shadow for the most dramatic effect. He stretched and distended the bodies, as if their insides were being drawn out of them.

  Although the Gates are widely considered Rodin’s crowning achievement, he never actually completed the work. It just kept growing and accumulating detail, eventually reaching more than twenty feet high and thirteen feet wide. He showed a plaster version in 1900, but otherwise he worked on it for thirty-seven years without ever seeing it cast in bronze as intended. More lucrative commissions caused delays and he claimed he could never find enough help. Every assistant he hired was either too talented to stick around or not talented enough to retain.

  In truth, Rodin was an unrelenting tinkerer. He may have had the hands of a genius, but his mind was “a mishmash of Dante, Michelangelo, Hugo, Delacroix,” wrote Edmond de Goncourt upon a visit to Rodin’s studio two years into his work on the Gates. To Goncourt, the epic jumble looked like a coral reef and Rodin seemed to be “a man of projects, sketches, fragmenting himself in a thousand imaginings, a thousand dreams, but bringing nothing to complete realization.”

  THERE WAS ONE OTHER persistent diversion in Rodin’s life then: the young sculptress Camille Claudel. In 1882, Rodin took over teaching a small Friday afternoon art class as a favor to his friend Alfred Boucher, who was leaving for a research sabbatical in Florence.

  It is not hard to imagine what the artist saw in the talented student with warm chestnut hair and cold blue eyes. She had a frank, some might say savage, disposition—sighing loudly when bored and muttering comments under her breath in a strong country accent. She struck many as rude, but to Rodin she was irresistible. In a playful questionnaire she filled out at the time, she displayed her defiant charm:

  Your favourite qualities in man:

  To obey his wife.

  Your favourite qualities in woman:

  To make her husband fret.

  Your favourite virtue:

  I don’t have any: they are all boring.

  It is equally understandable why the eighteen-year-old girl did not immediately return the affections of her forty-two-year-old teacher. Encouraged by a teacher to pursue her art in Paris, she had just moved with her family from a rural village in France to the heart of Montparnasse. Surrounded by artists in nearly ev
ery unit of her apartment building, for the first time she wasn’t an outsider. In the scheme of all this excitement, her middle-aged teacher probably did not rank terribly high. To judge from her playful responses to a questionnaire at the time, the notion of marriage itself was of trivial significance to her then.

  But within a year, Rodin had fallen desperately, pathetically in love with Claudel. At times when she refused to see him, he found excuses to call on her friend who he thought might be with Claudel. “Have pity, mean girl. I can’t go on. I can’t go another day without seeing you,” he wrote to her in 1883.

  Despite their substantial differences, Claudel and Rodin were bound by a few undeniable affinities. He genuinely believed in her talent and took every opportunity to promote her professionally. Meanwhile, Rodin’s “rapid and luminous suggestions” about Claudel’s art began to impress the young artist. They shared a devotion to work, and the belief that it deserved primacy above all else.

  In 1885, Rodin needed to hire help to complete a major new commission. The Burghers of Calais was to be a memorial for six men from the French port town who offered up their lives in a bargain to save their fellow villagers from English siege in the fourteenth century. For the first time, Rodin enlisted women to assist him in his atelier—Claudel and her friend Jessie Lipscomb.

  Claudel quickly became Rodin’s top assistant, both on the Burghers and the Gates. While the other assistants chatted and smoked cigarettes around her, she stayed concentrated, quietly sculpting the little hands and feet that Rodin entrusted to her alone. By the following year, Claudel and Rodin were madly in love. Their relationship reached such an intensity that Rodin wrote a contract for Claudel promising not to teach or sleep with other women. He pledged to leave Beuret and take Claudel to Italy for six months, after which they would marry.

  During the years of his relationship with Claudel, Rodin’s interest in women expanded more generally, both as subjects for his art and in life. His social circle widened to include more progressive artists, many of whom had married women who were accomplished in their own rights. Female forms began appearing more frequently in Rodin’s sculpture, too, sometimes bearing Claudel’s visage. He experimented with erotic positions, such as the life-sized marble lovers in The Kiss, completed in 1889. The man and the woman are locked in an embrace so intimate that an observer can walk around the entire sculpture and never find an entry point to view their faces. Divorced from the prying eyes of outsiders, the couple form their own private universe, just as Claudel and Rodin had done, at least for a little while.

  AS RODIN TURNED FIFTY, his work baffled critics more than ever. They did not know how to categorize this figure who had not attended the Grande École and had never apprenticed to a living master. More bizarrely, he seemed to embrace his amateur qualities. Rather than correcting or covering up mistakes, he highlighted them.

  But while critics watched askance, artists were quicker to appreciate Rodin’s talent. Paul Cézanne was such a fan that, upon their first meeting in 1894, he was reportedly moved to tears. They were at Monet’s house in Giverny with Octave Mirbeau, Gustave Geffroy and Georges Clemenceau when Cézanne gushed to Geffroy, “He’s not proud, Monsieur Rodin; he shook my hand!” The painter, then fifty-five, stooped to one knee to thank the sculptor for gracing him with the gesture.

  Stefan Zweig held Rodin in similar reverence. While visiting the sculptor in his studio, the Austrian writer watched as he started to make little adjustments to a bust he had been working on. He was supposed to be showing Zweig around, but became so absorbed in the work that he forgot about his visitor altogether. When he finally looked up, he was startled to see Zweig standing there. The sculptor started to apologize, but Zweig stopped him short. “I merely grasped his hand in gratitude. I would have preferred to kiss it.”

  When Émile Zola was appointed head of the Society of Men and Letters in 1891, his first order of business was to award Rodin a commission for a monument to Honoré de Balzac. Zola thought it was a disgrace that there was still no monument to the great naturalist writer three decades after his death. He could think of no better candidate for the job than Rodin, the great naturalist artist who was sometimes labeled, derisively, the “Zola of sculpture.” Critics considered both men “touched by erotic madness” and promoters of a crude, warts-and-all realism.

  When Rodin agreed to the commission he did not say what the statue would look like, quite possibly because he didn’t have a clue himself. He still had to conduct extensive research, beginning with a trip to the author’s hometown, and then locate a model with just the right physiognomy. At the same time, he was completing several other monuments to French genius, to Hugo, Baudelaire and the painter Claude Lorrain.

  Delaying matters further, he and Claudel were fighting worse than ever. As Rodin’s fame grew during these years, so did attention from his models and other admirers. Claudel felt that he had allowed these outsiders to encroach on their sacred privacy, and her jealousy flared up more and more. She had also begun to doubt whether he would ever fulfill his promise to leave Beuret.

  Beuret was keenly aware of Rodin’s affair with Claudel. Although it tormented her, she preferred to look the other way rather than surrender him altogether. But unlike with his previous infidelities, she sensed for the first time that Claudel posed a serious threat and she knew she couldn’t just stand by. The two women became bitter rivals, with Beuret once reportedly pulling a gun on the young mistress after catching her spying from the shrubs outside their house. Claudel, meanwhile, gave Rodin a series of drawings depicting Beuret as a broomstick-wielding ogress and, in another, a feral beast crouched on all fours. Rodin often appears in them, too—shackled, shriveled and stripped nude. Rodin pretended that the situation was entirely out of his hands. He had no problem continuing separate relationships with both women, and couldn’t fathom why Claudel couldn’t appreciate that she was the favored one.

  Eventually the resentments and failed promises became more than Claudel could bear. Her emotions had started consuming all of her energy and distracted her from work. By 1893, she felt she had lost something of herself in Rodin and initiated a separation. Rodin, devastated but unwilling to put up a fight, slunk quietly away and began looking for property outside of Paris for himself and Beuret.

  Ending the relationship with Rodin proved to be only the beginning of Claudel’s troubles, however. Emerging from beneath the massive shadow he had cast over her career proved far more complicated. Her reputation as his mistress was by then well known, and that made it nearly impossible to carve out a style for herself that did not remind people of his. Her strategy was to confront the rumors head-on and speak out unreservedly about the ways he had taken advantage of her vulnerability, as a much younger woman and as an aspiring artist.

  Much to Claudel’s horror, Rodin continued trying to promote her career. A year after their split, he visited an exhibition that included one of her busts and announced to the press that it had “hit me like a blow of the fist. It has made her my rival.” For years he went on quietly securing her jobs and exhibitions behind her back. When Claudel found out that his influence had factored into one commission, in 1895, she turned the work into a withering rebuttal. She spent four years crafting the three life-sized bronze figures into an elaborate revenge fantasy: A winged hag drags a feeble old man, one of his arms hanging back in the direction of a nude woman, who has fallen to her knees. The girl reaches out for the man, imploring him to come back. But it is too late, the she-beast has him in her claws for good.

  When the work, titled The Age of Maturity, debuted in 1902, already tense relations with Claudel’s family worsened. Her mother and sister blamed her for tarnishing the family name. Her brother, the Christian poet Paul Claudel, described his horror at seeing the sculpture for the first time: “This young nude girl is my sister! My sister Camille, imploring, humiliated, on her knees; this superb, this proud young woman has depicted herself in this fashion.”

  Claudel locked
herself up in her studio for nearly twenty years. Worried she’d forget how to speak, she took to talking to herself. Rodin’s covert machinations on her behalf fueled a paranoid belief that he was following her and stealing her ideas. She lived in filth and impoverishment until, in 1913, her brother committed her to a mental institution. He was convinced that the demon from The Age of Maturity had ripped more than Rodin from her. It had torn away “her soul, genius, sanity, beauty, life, all at the same time.”

  Others were not so sure of her insanity, however. Several friends who visited Claudel reported back that she seemed in full possession of her wits and wanted nothing more than to return home. A number of letters she wrote at the time suggest the same. “I am so heartbroken that I have to keep living here that I am no longer human,” she wrote to her mother in 1927. She could not understand why she was the one being punished when it was Rodin, an old “millionaire,” who had exploited her. Yet her pleas went unanswered and she remained at the asylum for thirty years, until she died at age seventy-nine. She was buried there in a mass grave.

  Perhaps even more tragic, however, is the reality that Claudel succumbed to her greatest fear, that her name would be eternally entwined with Rodin’s. During her lifetime alone, the affair became popular tabloid gossip and fodder for dramatic works like Henrik Ibsen’s 1899 play When We Dead Awaken. After Claudel’s death, her brother donated many of her works to the Musée Rodin, which today houses the largest collection of Claudel’s sculptures in the world.

  CHAPTER

  4

  IN THE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS LEADING UP TO THE TURN OF the century, the population of most major European cities doubled, if not tripled. Writers took to describing the rapid urbanization in terms of disease. The smog-engulfed metropolis became a festering sore, oozing sewage into the rivers, sulfurizing the air and breeding bacteria as residents piled on top of each other in apartment complexes.