The Thinker

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The Thinker in front of the Musée Rodin in Paris

The sculpture The Thinker ( French Le Penseur ) is one of the main works of the sculptor Auguste Rodin and was created between 1880 and 1882.

The plastic

The boxer Jean Baud

The original is in the possession of the Musée Rodin in Paris , a copy is on the artist's grave in Meudon . The sculpture is 72 cm high, made of bronze and has been finely patinated and polished .

The work was enlarged in 1902 to a height of 181 cm. The monumental version became the artist's first work in public space.

The model for this sculpture, as for other works by Rodin, was the muscular French prize boxer and wrestler Jean Baud, who usually appeared in the red-light district. The sculpture is supposed to represent Dante Alighieri , the ingenious creator of the Divine Comedy . Due to Rodin's long preoccupation with his work and thus also with the boundaries of heaven and hell, the sculptor got into a severe existential crisis. The Hell Gate , a portal developed from Dante's Inferno for the Musée des Arts décoratifs - a state commission that was given up in 1880 - kept him busy until the end of his life. For this he created 186 figures, some of which were also free. So does The Thinker , who is very tense, muscular and internalized, reflecting on the actions and fate of people. This and many other works by Rodin were groundbreaking for modernism and heralded a new age of three-dimensional artistic creation.

Jean Baud was also depicted on the Swiss 50-franc note from 1911 by Hodler in 1911 .

Locations of the casts

There are over 20 bronze and plaster casts of this statue today that are scattered around the world.

Original size

Monumental version

Plaster cast from 1904 in the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg

reception

Rodin's Thinker (in the park of the Lindesche Villa with the family in the background)

The Lübeck doctor Max Linde had a copy of the monumental version cast for himself in 1904 and set it up in the garden of his villa . There Edvard Munch painted his painting Rodin's Thinker in the garden of Dr. Linde , which is now in the Behnhaus . The cast later went to the Detroit Institute of Arts .

In his film The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin shows the Venus of Milo and Rodin's Thinker with the modification that the left arms are stretched up in the Hynkel salute. With this allusion to the Hitler salute , Chaplin addresses the integration of art into Nazi propaganda .

In the film Night at Museum 2 , the protagonists encounter a statue of the thinker that has been brought to life. When asked, he simply replies: "I think ... I think ... I think". Later in the film, he flirts with a statue of Aphrodite .

In Dying for Beginners , the statue is quoted when Alan Tudyk is sitting naked on a roof in a "thinker pose".

In Midnight in Paris , the French first wife at the time, Carla Bruni, made a cameo appearance as a tour guide by explaining the sculpture of the thinker to an American group of visitors in the garden of the Musée Rodin.

In the music video of the singer Ariana Grande "God Is a Woman", she sits in the pose of a thinker while she is attacked by angry little men. They throw words into them that they take from the book they are on. However, these bounce off the singer when they reach them.

As part of the Stadt.Wand.Kunst project launched in Mannheim to paint houses in the city with large-scale murals by national and international artists from the street art scene, Rodin's thinker was picked up and featured in the mural “ The Modern Thinker “Implemented.

Web links

Commons : The Thinker  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Dan Barry, William K. Rashbaum, Born of Hell, Lost After Inferno; Rodin Work From Trade Center Survived, and Vanished, New York Times, May 20, 2002
  2. ↑ penseur.org: Alexis Rudier casts , accessed September 11, 2010
  3. ^ Claudia Clausius: The gentleman is a tramp. Charlie Chaplin's comedy . P. Lang, New York 1989, ISBN 0-8204-0459-4 , p. 127.
  4. ^ Anette Insdorf: Indelible Shadows. Film and the Holocaust . Third ed. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge / New York / Port Melbourne / Madrid / Cape Town 2003, Black Humor, pp. 61 (English, digitized version [accessed on April 14, 2013]).
  5. ↑ imdb.com: Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2009) - Memorable quotes , accessed September 11, 2010
  6. ↑ David Edelstein: Baby, You're a Star. No, really. That's your role. , New York Magazine August 10, 2007, accessed September 11, 2010