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AUGUSTE RODIN (1840-1917) Le Baiser signed "A Rodin" (on the side of the rock); stamped with foun...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:1,400,000.00 - 1,800,000.00 USD
AUGUSTE RODIN (1840-1917) Le Baiser signed A Rodin (on the side of the rock); stamped with foun...
AUGUSTE RODIN
(1840-1917)
Le Baiser
signed "A Rodin" (on the side
of the rock); stamped with foundry mark "Georges Rudier
fondeur, Paris"
(on the back of the base);
stamped "(c) musée rodin, 1955" (on the back side of the base); signed with raised signature
"a rodin" (on the
inside of the base)
bronze with dark brown patina
height: 34 1/2 in. (87.6 cm)
conceived ca. 1880;
this bronze version cast in 1955
Estimate: $1,400,000-1,800,000 <p>Provenance
Musée Rodin, Paris
Charles Slatkin, New York (acquired from the above)
Private Collection, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner
Literature:
Paul Gsell, Auguste Rodin, die Kunst, Gespräche des Meisters gesammelt von Paul Gsell, Leipzig, 1918 (original marble illustrated in a photograph of the studio, frontispiece)
Musée Rodin, catalogue sommaire des oeuvres d'Auguste Rodin et autres oeuvres d'art de la donation Rodin, Hotel Biron, Paris, 1924, p. 33, no. 77 (original marble illustrated)
Musée Rodin, catalogue sommaire des oeuvres d'Auguste Rodin et autres oeuvres d'art de la donation Rodin. Hotel Biron, Paris, p. 31 no. 77 (original marble illustrated)
Georges Grappe, Catalogue du Musée Rodin, Paris, 1944, p. 58, no. 166 (original marble illustrated)
Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, London, 1946, pl. VI (original marble illustrated)
Jean Charbonneaux, Les sculptures de Rodin, Paris, 1949, p. XII, pls. 50 and 51 (another cast illustrated)
Anonymous, Auguste Rodin, Leicester, 1951, pl. 49 (original marble illustrated)
Cecile Goldscheider, Rodin, sa vie, son oeuvre, son heritage, Paris, 1962, p.49 (original marble illustrated)
Albert E. Elsen, Rodin, New York, 1963, p. 63 (another cast illustrated)
Auguste Rodin, An Exhibition of Sculptures/Drawings, exh. cat., Charles E. Slatkin Galleries, New York; Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; The Art Gallery of Toronto; Winnipeg Art Gallery; William Rockhill Nelson Gallery, Kansas City; Cleveland Museum of Art; Baltimore Museum of Art; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Dallas Museum of Fine Arts; Minneapolis Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge and National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, 1963-1965, p. 95, no. 103 (original marble illustrated)
Rodin, exh. cat., Roland, Browse and Delbanco, London, 1967, p. 14, no. 36 (another cast illustrated)
Lonel Jianou and Cecile Goldschieder, Rodin, Paris, 1967 (original marble illustrated, pls. 54 and 55)
Bernard Champigneulle, Rodin, London, 1967 (plaster cast illustrated, pls. 78 and 79)
Robert Descharnes and Jean-Francois Chabrun, Auguste Rodin, Lausanne, 1967, p. 131 (original marble illustrated)
Homage to Rodin, Collection of B. Gerald Cantor, exh. cat., Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Brooklyn Museum of Art; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the California Palace of the Legion of Honour, San Francisco, 1967-1969, no. 33 (plaster cast illustrated, p. 61)
Ellen Landis, Rodin Bronzes from the Collection of B. Gerald Cantor, New York, 1969, no. 16 (another cast illustrated)
John L. Tancock, The Sculpture of Auguste Rodin, Philadelphia, 1976, p. 77 (original marble illustrated)
Jacques de Caso and Patricia B. Sanders, Rodin's Sculpture, San Francisco, 1977, p. 148 (another cast illustrated)
Albert E. Elsen, In Rodin's Studio, a Photographic Record of Sculpture in the Making, Ithaca, 1980 (original marble illustrated on the cover)
Albert E. Elsen, Auguste Rodin, 1840-1917, New York, 1981, p. 38 (another cast illustrated)
Rodin Rediscovered, exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1981-1982, p. 87 (original marble illustrated)
J. Adolphe Schmoll Gen. Eisenwerth, Rodin-Studien, Persönlichkeit-Werke-Wirkung-Bibliographe, Munich, 1983, p. 281 (original marble illustrated)
Rodin, exh. cat., Fondation Pierre Gianadda, Martigny, 1984, p. 83, no. 33 (another cast illustrated)
Albert E. Elsen, The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin, Stanford, 1985, p. 79, fig. 70 (another cast illustrated)
Hélène Pinet, Rodin, sculpteur et les photographes de son temps, Paris, 1985, p. 46, no. 34 (original marble illustrated)
Frederic V. Grunfeld, Rodin, A Biography, New York, 1987, pp. 187-190, 221-222, 260, 262, 275-276, 281-282, 342, 373-374, 400, 457 and 577
Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, Rodin, La collection du Brasseur
Carl Jacobsen à la Glyptothèque - et oeuvres apparentées, Copenhagen, 1988, p. 107, no. 17 (another cast illustrated)
Rodin, Eros and Creativity, exh. cat., Kunsthalle, Bremen and Städische Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, 1992, p. 48 (original marble illustrated in a photograph of the studio)
Le baiser is one of the signature works of Rodin's entire oeuvre, its fame equaled only by that of Le penseur. The sculpture was inspired by an episode in Dante's Inferno recounting the illicit affair between Francesca da Rimini and her husband's brother, Paolo Malatesta, who were overcome with passion while reading the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere. Interrupted and killed by Francesca's husband in the midst of their first embrace, they were condemned to the second circle of Hell, punishing lust. Rodin's depiction of the ill-fated lovers was originally conceived as part of the Porte de l'enfer, a monumental portal representing Dante's Inferno that the French government commissioned from the sculptor in 1880. Considered too large and too tender for the overall design of the gates, the embracing lovers were removed from the composition and developed as a free standing statue - an intimate and erotic depiction of a couple's first kiss, justly celebrated by critics and collectors since its inaugural exhibition in 1887.
Although the theme of the embrace appears several times in Rodin's oeuvre, Le baiser is unparalleled in its poignant description of the complex emotions associated with the inception of love. The woman initiates the intimacy, her body stretching toward her partner's with sensuous, feline grace. The man is more timid, almost unprepared for the kiss. He leans back slightly, his posture stiff and angular. His right hand presses gently against the woman's thigh, evoking at once restraint and desire; his left hand still clutches a book, presumably the tale of Lancelot and Guinevere. Despite these contrasts of pose and bearing, the two figures are clearly united by their intertwining embrace and by the self-enclosed pyramidal structure of the composition as a whole. In fact, the sculpture proved so universal and compelling an image of passion that it scandalized Rodin's contemporaries, who were unaccustomed to seeing nude protagonists with no explicit allegorical or mythological reference. When Rodin sent Le baiser to the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, it was branded pornographic and placed in a private room, with admission by special application only. As late as 1957, the work was still considered too erotic to appear on a poster in the London subway (R. Descharnes and J.-F. Chabrun, Auguste Rodin, Lausanne, 1967, p. 133).
The date that Le baiser was conceived as a free standing statue remains uncertain. It was first exhibited in 1887 in Paris and Brussels, and as a result is typically dated to the previous year. However, it bears a close thematic and stylistic relationship to Le printemps éternel of 1884, and may be the work described in an 1883 article as a "lovely and affecting" sculpture of Paolo and Francesca (quoted in J. de Caso and P.B. Sanders, Rodin's Sculpture, San Francisco, 1977, p. 153, no. 17). A writer for Le Figaro also records that the embracing couple remained part of the maquette for the Porte de l'enfer as late as January 1886, indicating that Rodin began to develop the composition as a sculpture in the round well before he decided to remove it from the gates.
The original version of Le baiser was approximately 34 inches high, the same size as the present example. In 1888, following the success of the sculpture in Paris and Brussels, the French government commissioned Rodin to create a monumental marble version, approximately 75 inches high. Work on the marble progressed slowly, and the sculpture, now in the Musée Rodin in Paris, was finally exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1898 (fig. 1). The same year, in an effort to keep pace with mounting demand from collectors, Rodin authorized the Barbédienne foundry to cast bronze editions of the sculpture in four reduced sizes (91/2 inches, 15 inches, 24 inches, and 283/4 inches), retaining the right to cast the original size himself. The present example is part of an edition that was cast by Georges Rudier after the sculptor's death under the supervision of the Musée Rodin.
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