AUGUSTE RODIN (1840-1917)

One of Auguste Rodin’s greatest and most well-known sculptures, Le Baiser, 1ère reduction was first conceived in 1886 and cast, during the artist’s lifetime, in 1912. Incarnating the eroticism and exhilarating emotion that defined Rodin’s œuvre—as well as the rapturous feeling of falling head-over-heels for someone—Le Baiser is an icon of modern sculpture and a stunning representation of romantic love. As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who worked for a time as Rodin’s secretary, observed of the work, “One feels that waves are passing into these bodies from their touching surfaces, shudderings of beauty, intimate and power. This is why one seems to see the rapture of the kiss in every part of these bodies; it is like a sun that rises, and its light shines everywhere” (quoted in Rodin, trans. R. Firmage, Salt Lake City, 1982, p. 38).
Le Baiser was inspired by the true story of Paolo and Francesca, the ill-fated Medieval lovers later recast in Dante’s Inferno. Rodin was a great admirer of Dante, who he saw as “not only a visionary, but also a sculptor” (quoted in op. cit., 1963, p. 35). In 1275, Francesca da Rimini was married to Giovanni Malatesta, a loveless union undertaken for political reasons. She later fell passionately and powerfully in love with her husband’s brother, Paolo; when they were discovered, Giovanni stabbed them both to death in a fury. Dante and Virgil meet Francesca and Paolo after descending to the second circle of Hell where they have been condemned to an eternity of torment and forced to wander forever for their sins. “Love,” says Francesca, “led the two of us unto one death” (Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto V, 106).
At first, Rodin had planned to include the tragic lovers in his La Porte de l'Enfer, the monumental bronze doors that had been commissioned by the French government in 1880 for the new Musée des Arts Décoratifs. But as Rodin chose not to represent their damnation but rather the couple’s first kiss—a moment of profound joy and optimism—the tender and erotic pairing was hardly suited to the harrowing image of Hell that he was in the process of creating. As such, Rodin reimagined his Paolo and Francesca as a freestanding work, and, eschewing the period costumes that were often worn in interpretations of Dante’s tale, sculpted them in the nude. Without doubt, passion emanates from Le Baiser, not just through their entwined bodies, but the delicacy of carving and minute details. Rodin has endowed his figures with a lifelike vitality, showing every muscle and nerve, a fluttering heartbeat and sigh. As he later reflected on his process, “I forced myself to express in each swelling of the torso or of the limbs the efflorescence of a muscle or of a bone which lay deep beneath the skin. And so the truth of my figures, instead of being merely superficial, seems to blossom from within to the outside, like life itself” (quoted in D. Rosenfeld, “Rodin’s Carved Sculpture,” in A.E. Elsen, ed., Rodin Rediscovered, Washington, D.C., 1981, p. 81).
One cannot help but be overwhelmed by the potency of feeling in Le Baiser, a sensation which helped to make the sculpture a success when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1898; it was described by a critic as “la vraie Beauté” and was seen as the era’s answer to the great sculptural traditions of antiquity (ibid., p. 87). Following this triumph, Rodin worked with the foundry Leblanc-Barbedienne to create an edition of the sculpture in bronze, and the resulting works, known as the “première reduction,” were produced between 1898 and 1918.