Description
Rilke on Rodin — a poet on a sculptor. In 1902, a young Rainer Maria Rilke was hired as Auguste Rodin’s secretary in Paris. The encounter changed both men — and produced this luminous little book: Rilke’s meditation on the sculptor of The Thinker, The Kiss, and The Burghers of Calais.
Part biography, part aesthetic manifesto, Rilke’s Rodin is really about artistic vocation itself: patience, solitude, looking long and hard, the slow ripening of a life’s work. Written in prose of unforgettable radiance, it remains the most beautiful short book ever written about a sculptor — and a covert autobiography of the young poet learning his own craft at the master’s elbow, before the famous falling-out that ended the job.
A gem for poetry and art lovers alike — two giants meeting across the page, each illuminating the other, in language that glows. Few books say so much about creativity in so few pages.
Few artists have inspired such beautiful writing as Auguste Rodin — and few writers understood him like Rainer Maria Rilke. Published in 1903, Auguste Rodin is the great poet’s meditation on the sculptor he knew intimately: Rilke served as Rodin’s secretary in Paris and watched the master work up close.
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nThis is no ordinary art book. Rilke writes about Rodin the way he wrote poetry — tracing how a craftsman of stone learned to see surfaces, how hands became landscapes, how figures like The Thinker and The Burghers of Calais emerged from years of patient labor. He describes the sculptor’s studio, his models, his relentless search for truth in form.
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nFor readers, it is two masterpieces in one: a portrait of Rodin, the defining sculptor of the modern age, and a window into Rilke’s own artistic becoming. Short, luminous, and endlessly rereadable, it remains one of the finest books ever written about an artist.
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nWhether you come to Rodin through the museum or through poetry, this small volume belongs beside his sculptures in your imagination.
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