The Gates of Hell
Auguste Rodin (1840 to 1917) · About 1880 to 1890 and 1917 (model), cast 1930 to 1933
Nearly five and a half metres tall, the great bronze door in the forecourt is crowded with more than two hundred figures who twist, fall, embrace and cling to the frame. At the top three identical shades point down toward the scene below; beneath them, on the lintel, sits a brooding man with his chin on his hand. He is The Thinker, and here he plays the role of the poet Dante looking down on the damned. The panels below teem with lovers and sinners drawn from Dante's Inferno and from Baudelaire, including Paolo and Francesca swept together in the wind and Ugolino crawling over his dying children.
Rodin received the commission in 1880 for a museum of decorative arts in Paris that was never built, and he worked on the door on and off for the rest of his life without ever calling it finished. He kept adding, removing and rearranging figures, and many of them took on lives of their own as independent sculptures: The Thinker, The Kiss, The Three Shades. Look at how the surfaces are never smooth. Bodies dissolve into the background or push out of it, and the frame itself seems to melt under the weight of the figures. This is sculpture as a river of clay, frozen at the moment Rodin stepped back.
No bronze was cast during Rodin's lifetime. Kojiro Matsukata ordered this cast in the nineteen twenties from the Musee Rodin in Paris, and it was produced between 1930 and 1933 by the founder Alexis Rudier. It is one of only a handful of casts in the world, and the first outside France. Because the collection was held in France until 1959, the Gates arrived in Tokyo together with the building that was designed to receive them. Walk around the side to see how thin the bronze actually is.
Did You Know? Matsukata's cast was the first of the Gates of Hell ever made in bronze; Rodin himself only ever saw the doors in plaster.
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