Rodin's Sculpture in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
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Rodin in High Demand
In the later part of the nineteenth century, sculpture became a large-scale enterprise. Growing cities, an expanding and wealthy middle class, and the industrial revolution created an unprecedented demand for multiple copies of popular sculpture. In that age of insatiable markets and government commissions there was no sculptor more modern, more admired, or more controversial than Auguste Rodin.
The avant-garde and bourgeoisie alike celebrated this powerful, prolific man, and
created a huge audience for his art. When Rodin made a new sculpture he usually started by modeling clay. Sometimes he fired the clay to produce terra-cotta sculptures; sometimes he reproduced the models in ceramic, wax, or plaster.
The plasters were primarily used to make bronze casts. Rodin also gave the plasters to
assistants, who would carve an identical copy from marble, or make reductions and
enlargements of the sculpture using a Collas machine.
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The Collas Machine
Invented in 1836 by a French engineer named Achille Collas, this machine uses a pantograph system to make proportionately larger or smaller duplications of a sculpture. The concept can be traced to ancient Greek and Roman artists, who wanted to reproduce the perfect proportions of the human figure in their sculpture. Their method was called pointing, which meant that measurements of the desired figure were taken, then proportionally increased or decreased on a model. Collas machines often look like lathes. On one turntable sits the plaster model. On a second turntable, connected to the first, sits a clay or plaster "blank" that has been roughly shaped to resemble the model but on a larger or smaller scale.
The Collas machine keeps the model and the blank in the same orientation as the
technician uses a tracing needle, linked to a sharp cutting instrument, or stylus, to
transfer a succession of profiles from the model onto the blank. Gradually the blank is
worked so that it becomes a larger or smaller duplicate of the model.
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Rodin and his skilled associate Henri Lebossé collaborated closely on reductions and
enlargements, and if they were not executed perfectly Rodin rejected them. Some sculptures that Rodin enlarged are The Walking Man, The Three Shades, and The Monument to Balzac. Reductions include The Age of Bronze, Pierre de Wiessant (from The Burghers of Calais group) and The Kiss. Rodin's best known sculpture, The Thinker, was first conceived as twenty-eight inches high. The
sculptor then had Lebossé enlarge it to a monumental seventy-nine inches and reduce it to
just fourteen and three-quarter inches.
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