By Joseph Phelan

One of the finest collections of Auguste Rodin's work – models and bronzes – went on display at the Royal Ontario Museum on Sept. 20, 2001. After touring the world, the collection was installed in a new museum in the Ontario town of Barrie. The museum is the centerpiece of a proposed "Art City" devoted to housing fine art exhibits on tour.

Rodin's gorgeous bronze and marble sculptures – erotically charged or tormented and defeated – are surely the perfect choice for such a venture. Rodin is the Wagner of modern sculpture; he is one of those rare artists whose work speaks to the deep longings in most people, yet one whose work repays repeated visits and study. Discriminating viewers will be struck by the haunting depth of vision and the artist's impeccable craftsmanship.

Rodin is also one of those artists who form a bridge between the Romanticism of the 19th century and the Modernism of the 20th, allowing us to see how we arrived at where we are now. A good example is his first bust, The Man with the Broken Nose (1864), inspired by an old workman with a smashed in nose who yet had some of the features of a Greek bust. For the first time a sculptor took as his model not the perfection of classical sculpture but its present day fragmentary condition. Almost all busts that survive from antiquity have broken noses, just as most antique statues have lost heads, hands and other extremities.

Unfortunately there is a side of Rodin's work that has become kitsch through cheap reproductions and commercial rip-offs. This includes some of his best pieces like The Three Shades, and especially The Thinker.

Cultural kitsch has a way of containing long lost loveliness, if you know how to rub off the patina hiding the bronze. I asked a group of savvy art students and cognoscenti who The Thinker was. A few graduate students thought it could be a famous philosopher, perhaps Plato, or even Nietzsche's Superman; I reminded them that Nietzsche was unknown to the world when Rodin created The Thinker, and Plato wasn't even close. A few said it reminded them of the young Marlon Brando with his perfect body from his Streetcar Named Desire days.

The Thinker was originally meant to be Dante in front of the Gates of Hell, pondering his great poem. Dante as a voluptuous naked male may seem absurd to those who think of the images painted in his time and after, but Dante's head does bear some resemblance to the profile of The Thinker. Moreover, Dante's headdress is distinctive and seems to be indicated by the markings Rodin made on his working copy of The Thinker.

Why is The Thinker naked? Because Rodin wanted a heroic figure à la Michelangelo to represent Thinking as well as Poetry.

Rodin himself wrote about his intention: “The Thinker has a story. In the days long gone by I conceived the idea of the Gates of Hell. Before the door, seated on the rock, Dante thinking of the plan of the poem behind him... all the characters from the Divine Comedy. This project was not realized. Thin ascetic Dante in his straight robe separated from all the rest would have been without meaning. Guided by my first inspiration I conceived another thinker, a naked man, seated on a rock, his fist against his teeth, he dreams. The fertile thought slowly elaborates itself within his brain. He is no longer a dreamer, he is a creator.”

The work of Rodin resonates with the great aspirations of the 19th century, the century of Darwin, Marx and Wagner. But in his equation, The Thinker = the Poet = the Creator, Rodin was way ahead of his time.