Monument to Balzac

Monument to Balzac
Artist	Auguste Rodin
Year	1892–1897
Type	Sculpture
Location	Musée Rodin, Paris

Monument to Balzac is a sculpture by Auguste Rodin in memory of the French novelist Honoré de Balzac. According to Rodin, the sculpture aims to portray the writer's persona rather than a physical likeness.^[1] The work was commissioned in 1891 by the Société des Gens de Lettres and a full-size plaster model was displayed in 1898 at a Salon in Champ de Mars.^[2] After coming under criticism the model was rejected by the société and Rodin moved it to his home in Meudon.^[2] On 2 July 1939 (22 years after the sculptor's death) the model was cast in bronze for the first time and placed on the Boulevard du Montparnasse at the intersection with Boulevard Raspail.

Casts and various studies of the sculpture are today in many different collections including the Ackland Art Museum,^[3] Middelheim Open Air Sculpture Museum in Antwerp, The Norton Simon Museum of Art, the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo, the Musée Rodin in Meudon, the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Hirschhorn Sculpture Garden (Smithsonian) in Washington D.C, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, in front of the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands, in Caracas, Venezuela in the open spaces around the former Ateneo de Caracas, now UNEARTES and Balzac in the Robe of a Dominican Monk in Museo Soumaya in Mexico City. Today the artwork is sometimes considered the first truly modern sculpture.

In his 1969 documentary series Civilisation, Kenneth Clark said Rodin's statue of Balzac is "the greatest piece of sculpture of the nineteenth century — perhaps, indeed, since Michelangelo," continuing that, "Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives scorns conventional values, defies fashionable opinions, as Beethoven did, and should inspire us to defy all those forces that threaten to impair our humanity: lies, tanks, tear gas, ideologies, opinion polls, mechanisation, planners, computers—the whole lot."^[4]