Artspotting: Gates of Hell

Auguste Rodin was a Frenchman who lived during the second half of the 19th century (he died in 1917). He is probably the most famous and influential sculptor of the last 200 years. Top five, at least. But it is not always easy to say why Rodin's sculptures are so special, and why they revolutionized the art of sculpting.

Luckily, a casting of The Gates of Hell is to be found here in Philadelphia. You can walk up to one of the world's most important sculptures and see it for yourself. What you'll notice right away is the chaos of the Gates. There are figures hanging off the doorjamb and clinging to the sides of the sculpture. You'll see a version of The Thinker at the top of the doors, mulling over the scene below. You'll also see a version of Rodin's famous The Kiss and, at the very top, the Three Shades. If you are thinking that The Gates of Hell was a kind of laboratory for all of Rodin's sculpture, you'd be correct.

But what exactly was Rodin cooking up in his laboratory? Well, one thing he was trying to do was make Gates of Hell about the overall feeling of Hell, and less about any one specific Hell narrative. Many of the individual figures in Gates of Hell are based on episodes from Dante's Inferno. There is a terrible story in Canto XXXIII of The Inferno in which a character named Ugolino is imprisoned in a tower and finally, in the throes of starvation, eats his own children. You can find Ugolino crouched over one of the children in the bottom left hand side of Rodin's sculpture.

But Rodin's sculpture does not tell the stories of Danto's Inferno as you might expect. A lot of sculptures in Rodin's day tried to tell stories in chronological fashion, like frames in a comic book. You could read them right to left (or left to right). Rodin places his figures out of order, in a jumbled mix. This is because Rodin's sculpture is not a story of Hell; it just is Hell.

Another thing you might notice in The Gates of Hell is that many of the figures seem unfinished. Look at them closely. Some are only half-shaped, like they are still stuck in the bronze. And on the sides of the sculpture you can see marks and scrapes that come from the tools Rodin was using on the sculpture. Rodin wants the sculpture to tell the viewer how it was made. He doesn’t want the sculpture to look too polished, too refined, too complete. It is important to Rodin that we see the messiness of artistic creation.

Rodin never completed The Gates of Hell. He was still working on versions of it when he died. The casting of The Gates of Hell at the Rodin Museum is thus the snapshot of a process that, for Rodin, could never be complete, just as creation is never complete. This incomplete masterpiece can be seen anytime the Rodin Museum is open, free of charge, on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.