Rodin liked to describe himself as a man of the people, recalling this "until the age of 50 I had all the worries of poverty." Life there­after was very different. Pursued by Patrons and titled ladies, his studio crowded with young followers and famous sitters, he was hailed as the greatest sculptor of the time. In his final years the maïtre graciously re­ceived a visit from Edward VII of England but coolly turned down an ap­plication by Kaiser Wilhelm II for a bust of his imperial self. George Bernard Shaw paid a handsome 1,000 the equivalent of at least 418.000 GBP today-for a Portrait bust in marble. The actress Eleanora Dupe Game to recite for Rodin and Wanda Landowska to play her harp­sichord for him, as Isadora had danced for him. The painter Paul Cézanne, grateful for his handshake, dropped to his knees before him. He was awarded a doctorate from Oxford and the gold emblem of a Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour.

Poets as well as statesmen celebrated him. The German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who briefly became his secretary, rhapsodized that Ro­din's figures were "invincible . . . transcendent . . . unsurpassable re­alizations." Guillaume Apollinaire, one of the hard-living bande Picasso that gathered in Montmartre cafés around a young firebrand painter from Catalonia, hailed Rodin's work as "sublime." Rodin's worldwide impact was unequalled by any artist until Picasso himself moved into his prime. Between the two men, who probably never met, there were striking similarities in Invention, personal magnetism and Power, though a later generation might regard them as worlds apart.

Continuum controversy was also a part of Rodin's fame. There was a near-riot in the city of Nancy in 1892 when a crowd broke up the unrevealing of a monument by Rodin to protest the sketchy way in which he had sculpted the horses. There was persistent furore throughout the 1890s over a Statue he was making of the late novelist Honoré de Bal­zac; eventually the completed work was rejected as "artistically insufficient" by the literary society that had commissioned it. ("An ig­noble and insane nightmare," one critic celled it.) And the ultimate scandal at the Chicago World's Fair of 1893, Rodin's The Kiss was put away as unfit for public showing.

The Fair had been planned to outdo the recent Paris Exposition and to commemorate the 400th anniversary of America's discovery. A vast “White City" arose beside Lake Michigan, with classical domes, plazas and lagoons vying for attention with a midway, a giant Ferris wheel and smoother "Street of Cairo." Mrs. Potter Palmer, Chicago's leading hostess and art collector, was one of the Fair's commissioners; the well-known American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was one of its designers. Saint-Gaudens was as elated as plans for its Palace of Fine Arts look shape that he exclaimed to his fellow committeemen, "Look here, do you realize that this is the greatest meeting of artists since the Fifteenth Century!"

Rodin was of course among the artists that the Americans wanted to include, hut when the Grates bringing his contributions were opened, the chief exhibit was found to be The Kiss, with its strongly wrought lov­ers. To the shocked Fair authorities it did no good to point out that The Kiss had recently been acquired by the French state itself for 20,000 francs it simply would not do for public display in Chicago. So, while fairgoers were encouraged to buy tickets to leer at belly' dancers and the midway, The Kiss was relegated to an inner chamber at the Fair, ad­mission upon personal application only. Yet prudery did not completely prevail. Not long after The Kiss was first shown, or rather not shown, at Chicago, an American collector living in England ordered a copy of it in Pen telic marble for £1,000, specifying through his agent that he anted it also to be as explicit as possible: "l'orgarce génital de l'homme dolt être complet."

Eventually The Kiss (not necessarily complet) became so widely known as to be almost a stock image an the jackets of romantic novels and books an sexology. Rodin's muscular, brooding Thinker, sculpted in 1880, was fated to gain even greater fame and to become almost a tal­isman perhaps the most widely reproduced sculpture of all time. There would be mass-produced "Thinker" book ends available at drugstore counters in metal or plastic; "Thinker" lamp bases in brass; limestone "Thinker" replicas for the Portals of circulating libraries and college phi­losophy departments; prints of it in advertisements for physical culture, for self-improvement and even for an electrical appliance with a built-in "brain."

Thus popular tastes caught up with Rodin, while at the same time the educated tastes he had sought to impress began to bypass him. He be­came over accepted, overexposed ironically, chiefly through a few figures that were hardly his best. The highly original Burghers of Calais group, and his crowning work, the statue of Balzac, on which he laboured for seven years, never became favourites. Serious viewers wearied of much of his art and art came to regard it as dated and banal, es­pecially as the preferences of a new time moved into directions other than his.

Seen against the background of his time, Rodin stands forth as some­what larger than life-as one of that breed of stormy' titans who held an era transfixed by the Power of their Imagination and the huge scope of their labours. One thinks of Balzac of the vast Comédie Humaine, of Vic­tor Hugo of Les Misérables, of Tolstoi of War and Peace, peopling whole

worlds of their own; and of Zola, with his cycle of novels about one pas­sion-driven French family, and of Richard Wagner, creating his tempestuous Der Ring des Nibelungen.