Small Bronze Sculpture Cast Head After Rodin "Petite tete au nez retrousse"

Details

Description

(after) Auguste Rodin
Posthumous cast
"Petite tete au nez retroussé"
Featuring a bust of a woman.
Limited edition bronze is … Read more (after) Auguste Rodin
Posthumous cast
"Petite tete au nez retroussé"
Featuring a bust of a woman.
Limited edition bronze is mounted on a marble base and is signed on the lower right. Great detail.
Dimensions: approx. 7-1/4" tall x 5" across x 5" deep with base
Foundry mark on the reverse, #13 of 299 produced.

François Auguste René Rodin (1840 – 1917) was a French sculptor generally considered the founder of modern sculpture. Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, and deeply pocketed surface in clay. He is known for such sculptures as The Thinker, Monument to Balzac, The Kiss, The Burghers of Calais, and The Gates of Hell. He modeled the human body with naturalism, and his sculptures celebrate individual character and physicality. Although Rodin was sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, he refused to change his style, and his continued output brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.
Rodin became the preeminent French sculptor of his time. By 1900, he was a world-renowned artist. Wealthy private clients sought Rodin's work after his World's Fair exhibit, and he kept company with a variety of high-profile intellectuals and artists. His student, Camille Claudel, became his associate, lover, and creative rival. Rodin's other students included Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brancusi, and Charles Despiau.
Rodin entered the studio of Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, a successful mass producer of objets d'art. Rodin worked as Carrier-Belleuse' chief assistant until 1870, designing roof decorations and staircase and doorway embellishments. With the arrival of the Franco-Prussian War, Rodin was called to serve in the French National Guard, but his service was brief due to his near-sightedness. Rodin took classes with animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye. The teacher's attention to detail and his finely rendered musculature of animals in motion significantly influenced Rodin. Rodin won the 1880 commission to create a portal for a planned museum of decorative arts. Rodin dedicated much of the next four decades to his elaborate Gates of Hell, an unfinished portal for a museum that was never built. Many of the portal's figures became sculptures in themselves, including Rodin's most famous, The Thinker and The Kiss. With the museum commission came a free studio, granting Rodin a new level of artistic freedom.
By 1900, Rodin's artistic reputation was established. Gaining exposure from a pavilion of his artwork set up near the 1900 World's Fair (Exposition Universelle) in Paris, he received requests to make busts of prominent people internationally, As Rodin's fame grew, he attracted many followers, including the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and authors Octave Mirbeau, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde.
Rodin and Beuret's modest country estate in Meudon, purchased in 1897, was a host to such guests as King Edward, dancer Isadora Duncan, and harpsichordist Wanda Landowska. He left Beuret in Meudon and began an affair with the American-born Duchesse de Choiseul. From 1910, he mentored the Russian sculptor, Moissey Kogan.
During his later creative years, Rodin's work turned increasingly toward the female form, and themes of more overt masculinity and femininity. He concentrated on small dance studies, and produced numerous erotic drawings, sketched in a loose way, without taking his pencil from the paper or his eyes from the model. Rodin met American dancer Isadora Duncan in 1900, attempted to seduce her, and the next year sketched studies of her and her students.

Rodin willed to the French state his studio and the right to make casts from his plasters. Because he encouraged the edition of his sculpted work, Rodin's sculptures are represented in many public and private collections. The Musée Rodin was founded in 1916 and opened in 1919 at the Hôtel Biron, where Rodin had lived, and it holds the largest Rodin collection, with more than 6,000 sculptures and 7,000 works on paper. The French order Légion d'honneur made him a Commander, and he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford.
During his lifetime, Rodin was compared to Michelangelo, and was widely recognized as the greatest artist of the era. Rodin had enormous artistic influence. A whole generation of sculptors studied in his workshop. These include Gutzon Borglum, Antoine Bourdelle, Constantin Brâncuși, Camille Claudel, Charles Despiau, Malvina Hoffman, Carl Milles, François Pompon, Rodo, Gustav Vigeland, Clara Westhoff and Margaret Winser, Rodin also promoted the work of other sculptors, including Aristide Maillol and Ivan Meštrović whom Rodin once called "the greatest phenomenon amongst sculptors." Other sculptors whose work has been described as owing to Rodin include Joseph Csaky, Alexander Archipenko, Joseph Bernard, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Georg Kolbe, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Jacques Lipchitz, Pablo Picasso, Adolfo Wildt, and Ossip Zadkine. Henry Moore acknowledged Rodin's seminal influence on his work. Several films have been made featuring Rodin as a prominent character or presence. These include Camille Claudel, a 1988 film in which Gérard Depardieu portrays Rodin, Camille Claudel 1915 from 2013, and Rodin, a 2017 film starring Vincent Lindon as Rodin. Furthermore, the Rodin Studios artists' cooperative housing in New York City, completed in 1917 to designs by Cass Gilbert, was named after Rodin See less