The Gates Of Hell By Auguste Rodin

An examination of the great sculptured portal, illustrated with 100 photographs and drawings.

Une étude détaillée et largement illustrée des 227 figures qui ont servi de point de départ à l'oeuvre de Rodin. Un dépliant couleur présente l'ensemble des fontes à travers le monde et un dessin situe la totalité des figures. Un ouvrage de référence sur cette oeuvre grandiose (8 tonnes de bronze, plus de 6 mètres de haut).

Rodin has pronounced Rilke's essay the supreme interpretation of his work. A few years ago the sculptor expressed to the translators the wish that some day the book might be placed before the English-speaking public. The appreciation was published originally as one of a series of Art Monographs under the editorship of the late Richard Muther. To estimate and interpret the work of an artist is to be creatively just to him. For this reason there are fewer critics than there are artists, and criticism with but few exceptions is almost invariably negligible and futile.

The Gates of Hell: Rodin’s Passion in Stone is not just another biography of Rodin. There are many excellent ones already. Rather, it is an attempt to understand the sculptor, after immersion in his works, by listening to his own words and those spoken about him. For Rodin was more than a sculptor of genius. He had the imagination and the courage to search for the truth, not only with his artist’s hands, but with the penetrating gaze and mastery of the word that define the writer. His book Les Cathedrals de France and his hundreds of letters offer a new close-up of the artist, both visual and verbal. His musings on art and on life, and his contemporaries’ views of him, form a biographer’s trove. This rich assemblage of words, like a hoard of tiny fragments of stone and glass, when pieced together, form a mosaic likeness of an artist who was himself a story teller in stone.