You Must Change Your Life (2 page)

Although any comprehension of the building's architectural logic was beyond the boy's years, by the time he left boarding school in 1853, he understood that the cathedral had been his true education. He would revisit the site again and again over the years “with head raised and thrown back” in awe, studying its surfaces and imagining the secrets within. He joined the faithful in their worship at the cathedral, but not because it was a house of god. It was the form itself, he thought, that ought to drive people to their knees and pray.

FRAN
OIS AUGUSTE RENÉ RODIN
was born in Paris on November 12, 1840. It was a momentous year for the future of French art, also marking the births of Émile Zola, Odilon Redon and Claude Monet. But these seeds of the Belle Époque would spring from very arid, conservative soil. Shaken by both the Industrial and French revolutions, Paris under the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe was the city of depravity and poverty depicted in
Les Fleurs du Mals
and
Les Misérables
. New manufacturing jobs attracted thousands of migrant workers, but the city lacked the infrastructure to support them. These newcomers piled into apartments, sharing beds, food and germs. Microbes multiplied in the overflowing sewer system and turned the narrow medieval streets into trenches of disease. As crowds spread cholera and syphilis, a wheat shortage sent bread prices soaring and widened the gap between
les pauvres
and the
haute bourgeoisie
to historic proportions.

As the city scrambled to register a proliferating class of paupers, prostitutes and unwanted children, Rodin's father found plenty of opportunity for work as a police officer. Like the conflicted vice inspector Javert in
Les Misérables
, Jean-Baptiste Rodin patrolled the streets looking for pimps and courtesans throughout the 1832 Paris Uprising, and then later during the 1848 revolution that finally dethroned the
king. The job suited the impeccably principled and authoritarian man as he gradually ascended the ranks of the force.

When the barricades rose that year on the Rue Saint-Jacques, Jean-Baptiste and his seamstress wife, Marie, sent eight-year-old Auguste to the boarding school in Beauvais. There the elfin redhead remained safely tucked away from the bloody riots underway in Paris, which saw Baudelaire charge through the streets waving a gun and Balzac nearly starve to death.

Auguste was not an impressive student. He skipped classes and received poor grades, particularly in math. Although Beauvais offered an education more befitting of his father's rising professional stature, the tuition became a burden on the family. After five years, Jean-Baptiste decided not to waste any more money on an education that seemed unlikely to end with a career. When Auguste turned fourteen, his father withdrew him from school. The boy had always enjoyed working with his hands—perhaps trade school would suit him better.

When Auguste returned to Paris, his hometown was barely recognizable. The previous year, France's new president, Napoleon III, had appointed Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann to modernize the city—or to hack it to pieces, depending on who one asked. An obsessive symmetrist, Haussmann carved the landscape into a vast grid, divided into class-segregated arrondissements. He bulldozed the rolling hills to flatten the horizon and impose a sense of order. He widened the old winding brick streets into paved, barricade-proof boulevards that hindered rebels and welcomed strolling shoppers. A comprehensive cleansing initiative went into effect citywide. Engineers designed a new sewer system so advanced it became a tourist attraction. Aboveground the city installed thousands of gas lamps in the streets to light up the night and ward off criminals.

From the rubble of tens of thousands of demolished medieval houses rose five-story neoclassical apartments, built from uniform blocks of stone and aligned into neat, rectilinear rows. The rapid construction estranged many Parisians from their native city, replacing the traditional homes with those that seemed to belong to no place or time at
all. To many, the continuum of scaffolding on the streets looked less like progress than the skeletal remains of their butchered town.

For commercial sculptors, Haussmann's decades-long reconstruction effort meant big business. All of the new building façades needed cornices and stone decorations. The chief training ground for this burgeoning class of craftsmen, as well as for future clock-makers, woodworkers and metalsmiths, was the École Impériale Spéciale de Dessin et de Mathématiques, popularly known as the “Petite École.” Tuition-free, the Petite École was the working-class counterpart to the more prestigious Grande École des Beaux-Arts. While the latter groomed graduates like Renoir, Seurat and Bouguereau for careers as fine artists, it was virtually unheard-of for a student from the lower school to show in the official salons.

Rodin, having just returned to Paris unclear of his interests or ambitions, enrolled at the Petite École in 1854. He did not yet consider himself an artist, and he certainly did not share the exalted views espoused by the Grande École professors, who compared art to religion, language and law. Sculpture was then, and would always be, first and foremost a vocation for Rodin.

SOME BIOGRAPHERS HAVE SPECULATED
that Rodin's visual shortcomings may have nurtured his hypersensitive tactile intelligence. Perhaps it explained why he was always holding and rounding out lumps of clay in his palms. Even after he finally bought a monocle, he used it only to zoom in on the smallest of details. Most of the time he worked with his nose pressed flush against the clay (or, as one lover wryly noted, against his models).

Like most of his classmates, Rodin entered with the hopes of studying painting. But because it was cheaper to buy paper and pencils than paint and canvases, he settled on drawing classes instead. It was a hardship that had the fortunate outcome, however, of laying Rodin in the capable hands of Horace Lecoq de Boisbaudran, the professor who would first correct, and then truly open, Rodin's eyes.

Each morning, Rodin would gather his art supplies, tie a scarf around his slender neck and set off for his eight o'clock drawing lecture. Lecoq was a squat, soft-faced man, who liked to begin each session with a copying exercise. He believed that keen observation was the indispensable secret all great artists possessed. To master it properly, one had to figure out the essential nature of an object by breaking it down into parts: Copy a straight line from point A to point B, then add in the diagonals, the arcs, and so on until the components take form.

One morning, Lecoq placed an object in front of the class, instructing students to copy it onto paper. As he paced the aisles between desks observing their work, he noticed Rodin sketching only its crude outline and then making up the details on his own. Rodin did not strike Lecoq as a lazy student, so he couldn't understand why he wasn't completing the task correctly. That's when it occurred to him that perhaps the boy simply could not see. And so it was in a single exercise that Lecoq identified basic myopia as the mysterious ailment that had plagued Rodin for more than a decade.

The other transformative revelation from Lecoq's class took Rodin longer to grasp. The professor often sent students to the Louvre to practice observing the paintings. They were told not to sketch them, but to truly memorize their proportions, patterns and colors. The young Rodin passed his adolescence there on benches seated before works by Titian, Rembrandt and Rubens. They were visions that opened up and expanded inside him like music. He rehearsed every brushstroke in his mind so that he could return home at night, still exalted, and reproduce them from memory.

In his free time, he paid visits to the Bibliothèque Nationale to practice copying masterpieces from illustrated books. He made rough sketches of works by the great Italian draftsmen to take home and later fill in the details from memory. The boy became such a fixture at the library that by the time he turned sixteen he was one of the youngest students to ever receive official admission to the print room.

To some, Lecoq's emphasis on copying seemed to train students
only in the reproduction of other people's art. It was in many ways a traditional, mathematical approach to form and dimension that was in line with the curriculum at the Grande École. But Lecoq had a different goal in mind. He believed young artists ought to master the fundamentals of form only so that they might one day break them. “Art is essentially individual,” he said. The purpose of the memorization exercises was actually to allow the artists time to acknowledge their reactions to a picture as its properties unfolded to them. Did a gently arched line produce feelings of serenity? Did a densely wound shadow evoke anxiety? Did certain colors trigger memories? Once artists could name these associations they could then begin to harden their own pooling sensations into external forms of their making. Ultimately, Lecoq's modern method encouraged artists to draw things not strictly as they appeared, but as they felt and seemed. Emotion and substance became one.

Rodin's individual style started to emerge at around sixteen. His notebooks from the time reveal an artist already preoccupied with formal continuity and silhouette. In what would become a trademark tendency, he began conjoining the figures in his sketches, linking their bodies together into harmonious groupings that would later evolve into the ring-shaped masterworks of
The Burghers of Calais
and
The Kiss
.

Lecoq's lessons remained with Rodin long after he graduated and had established his reputation over the years as a sculptor of impressions rather than replications. He recalled Lecoq's training decades later, when tasked with modeling a bust of Victor Hugo, who refused to pose for any prolonged period of time. Rodin seized glimpses of the man as he passed by in the hall or read in another room, and then sculpted the images later from memory. One looks with the eyes, Lecoq had taught him, but one
sees
with the heart.

IT WASN'T LONG BEFORE
Rodin had mastered the curriculum offered at the Petite École. He finished lessons so quickly that the teachers eventually ran out of assignments. He did not care to socialize
with his classmates; he wanted only to work. The one exception was his uncommonly supportive friend Léon Fourquet, with whom Rodin shared a love of ponderous debates about the meaning of life and the artist's role in society.

The teenagers would stroll through the Luxembourg Gardens wondering whether Michelangelo and Raphael ever despaired for recognition as they did. They fantasized about fame, but Fourquet realized early on that this would be Rodin's fate alone. While Fourquet would go on to master the art of carving marble—a skill Rodin never learned—he always saw an aura of destiny surrounding Rodin and would later spend several years working for his friend. “You were born for art, while I was born to cut in marble what is germinating in your head—that's why we shall always be together,” Forquet once wrote him.

By 1857, Rodin had won the school's top drawing prizes. It seemed he had excelled at every subject except one, and it was the gold standard of artistic achievement: to render the human body. To Rodin, the human form was a “walking temple.” To model it in clay would be the closest he would ever come to building a cathedral. The human figure had fascinated Rodin for as long as he could remember. As a boy he used to watch his mother roll out and cut cake dough into playful shapes. Once she passed him the floury lump and he joined in, pinching out heads and bulky bodies for his mother to submerge in the bubbling oil. Once the dough men fried to a crisp, she spooned them out, revealing one hilariously disfigured character after another. It was, he later said, his first art lesson.

But since statue commissions went only to the “real” fine artists, trade schools had no reason to offer life drawing classes. If Rodin wanted to study the human form, he would have to transfer to the Grande École. So, in 1857, at the end of his third year at the Petite École, Rodin decided to embark upon the rigorous application.

At the six-day entrance exam, Rodin joined a semicircle of painters and sculptors before a live model each afternoon. According to some accounts, he waved his arms so wildly as he worked that the other students gathered around to watch. Because he was already producing
the disproportionate, heavy-limbed figures for which he would become famous, his art proved as unconventional as his gesticulating and it was, in the end, too much for the admissions committee. He passed the drawing exam but failed in sculpture and his application was denied.

Rodin reapplied the following semester, and the semester after that, and was turned away two more times. The rejections sent Rodin into such despair that his father grew worried. He wrote the boy a letter urging him to toughen up. “The day will come when one can say of you as of truly great men—the artist Auguste RODIN is dead, but he lives for posterity, for the future.” Jean-Baptiste knew nothing about art, except that it paid poorly, but he understood the power of perseverance: “Think about words such as: energy, will, determination. Then you will be victorious.”