Throughout his life, sculptor Auguste Rodin attempted to reach a fuller expression of the truth of the subject represented in his sculptures. Our visit will follow his evolution: he begins by removing the attributes that habitually characterize people, then chooses to not gloss over physical defects, often even amplifying them, and finally going as far as exploring physical proportions and deformed bodies.
Rodin is not trying to merely describe or tell, but to take the viewer inside the subjects in question. “I understood,” he said, “that around the person represented, it was imperative to imply like a halo of ideas to explain that person, thus making art expand like mysterious waves.” It is the “intimate person” that interests Rodin, and he always tried to reveal that richness, rather than report on the exterior circumstances of an existence.
Along with Balzac, he seems to have found was he was seeking. The simplicity we will have before our very eyes at the end of the visit, demonstrates how Rodin later oriented himself towards an art that made less and less references to the real world.

The works studied on this visit are: Monument to the Burghers of Calais, The Gates of Hell, a portrait of Rodin’s father, The Man with the Broken Nose, Young Woman with Floral Hatt, The Age of Bronze, The Kiss, Saint John the Baptist, The Cathedral, The Age of Maturity by Camille Claudel, The Thinker , Danaïd, and finally the Bust of Balzac .