5. Eternal Spring / Auguste Rodin (1884)

Eternal Spring / Auguste Rodin (1884)

Eternal Spring / Auguste Rodin (1884)

Bronze 

■ Statement

"It is Michelangelo who has freed me from academic sculpture."

■ Brief Biographical Information of Artist 

In a career that spanned the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Auguste Rodin (French, 1840–1917) was deeply inspired by tradition yet rebelled against its idealized forms, introducing innovative practices that paved the way for modern sculpture. He believed that art should be true to nature, a philosophy that shaped his attitudes to models and materials. Many know Rodin for the controversies surrounding certain of his works, such as the scandals around The Age of Bronze or the Monument to Honoré de Balzac, and for his unfinished projects, most famously, The Gates of Hell. But few who recognize Rodin's sculptures have failed to be moved by them. His genius was to express inner truths of the human psyche, and his gaze penetrated beneath the external appearance of the world. Exploring this realm beneath the surface, Rodin developed an agile technique for rendering the extreme physical states that correspond to expressions of inner turmoil or overwhelming joy. He sculpted a universe of great passion and tragedy, a world of imagination that exceeded the mundane reality of everyday existence.

■ Background of the Art work

The torso of the woman in this group is recognizable as that of a model named Adèle Abruzzezzi. Rodin used it repeatedly, and it appears, for example, in a very different context in The Gates of Hell. Eternal Spring is in a lighter vein, however, full of awakening sensuality and implying neither guilt nor punishment to come. The sculpture was extremely popular, and Rodin repeated it often both in marble and in bronze. In 1898, he sold his plaster foundry models with the reproduction rights for this sculpture and its spiritual twin, The Kiss, to the firm of Ferdinand Barbedienne, the commercial foundry. This marble, commissioned from Rodin in 1906 and finished in March 1907, displays the sensuous, veiled quality of carving that creates an impressionistic play of light and shade on the surface of the medium characteristic of the marbles of Rodin's later career.

■ Connection Between the Art and the Theme 

Eternal Spring, created with the theme of neither guilt nor punishment can also be seen as a fantasy to some individuals.