Auguste Rodin Quotes on Art

Auguste Rodin is a famous French sculptor. He is best known for his very modern approach to sculpture and was working around the same time as the French Impressionists. Famous Auguste Rodin sculptures include “The Thinker”, “The Kiss”, “St. John the Baptist Preaching”, “Monument to Balzac”, “The Gates of Hell” and “The Walking Man”.

Mini biography: Born François Auguste René Rodin on the 12th of November, 1840 in Paris, France. His mother was Marie Cheffer and his father Jean-Baptiste Rodin was a police clerk. He was in a relationship with the seamstress Rose Beuret for 53 years, only marrying her just weeks before her death in 1917. They had one son together: Auguste-Eugène Beuret. The artist died on the 17th of November, 1917 in the municipality of Meudon, Paris, France at the age of 77. Rodin was buried in Meudon at the Musée Rodin where a cast of his famous Thinker sculpture looks out over his gravesite.

List of Auguste Rodin Art Quotes

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. Auguste Rodin

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

When a good sculptor models a torso, he not only represents the muscles, but the life which animates them.. more than the life, the force that fashioned them and communicated to them, it may be, grace or strength, or amorous charm, or indomitable will. Auguste Rodin

I do not imitate the Greeks. I try to put myself in the spiritual State of the men who have left us the antique statues. Auguste Rodin

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

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. Auguste Rodin

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. Auguste Rodin

Auguste Rodin Self Portrait Drawing

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