Auguste Rodin
Grand torse de l'homme qui tombe, 1903/ cast 1980
Cast bronze
Museum Purchase with Student Government Association funds and Gift of the Reid Foundation
Although today Auguste Rodin is recognized as one of the most influential sculptors in art history, in his own time he struggled to find appreciation and recognition from critics. One of the reasons for this struggle was the rigid structure of the art world in late-nineteenth-century France, which was largely controlled by a formal body called the French Academy. They determined whose work could be shown in their large, yearly exhibition, and had final say over what was considered important or high quality. The Academy and the French public appreciated a particular kind of sculpture—figural, based on literary, mythological, or Biblical stories, and with a highly finished surface that mimicked the texture of real things (for instance, they thought that the skin on a marble sculpture of a person should look smooth and soft as it would on a human body, and not hard and stony like marble).
Rodin’s work defied all of the Academy’s expectations. He exhibited incomplete or partial figures with no narrative, and he embraced and experimented with surface textures. For instance, in Grande torse de l’homme qui tombe, or Torso of a Man Falling, Rodin not only left the marks his hands made as he built up the model, but the marks left by casting the sculpture in bronze. To make a bronze sculpture, the artist first creates a model out of plaster, clay, or another pliable material. If you look closely at the surface of this Torso, you can see where Rodin added or removed material from the model, where he cut it with string, where he smoothed over or dug into the surface.
The next step in bronze casting is to make a mold based on the original model, with a central core piece to make the bronze hollow. Liquid bronze is poured through the mold and cooled. This process leaves an irregular surface, with visible bubbles from air pockets, marks from the sprues (attached wax tubes that allow the bronze to be poured evenly), and so forth. In a French academic sculpture, these foundry marks would be carefully polished away, leaving the surface of the sculpture pristine. However, in Torso, Rodin left them visible.