Rodin 'The Thinker' Exhibition Poster

The Thinker is so familiar as a solitary seated figure that it is easy to forget he was conceived as part of a crowd. Auguste Rodin designed him around 1880 for The Gates of Hell, a vast bronze doorway commissioned for a planned Paris museum of decorative arts.

On the doors, the figure sat at the top of the tympanum, looking down over a churning mass of bodies drawn from Dante’s Inferno. Rodin first called him “The Poet,” and many read him as Dante himself, contemplating the damned below. Only later was the brooding figure enlarged and cast on his own, at which point he became the most reproduced sculpture in the world and a near-universal shorthand for thought itself. The museum was never built in Rodin’s lifetime, and The Gates of Hell remained an evolving project he returned to for decades, a quarry from which several of his most famous independent figures were drawn.

The pose tells you this is not calm reflection. Every muscle is tensed, the back curved, the whole frame clenched around the act of thinking. Rodin, the figure most responsible for dragging European sculpture out of academic convention and towards modern expressiveness, understood thought as physical labour, and he made a man think with his back and his feet as much as his head.

Our poster imagines a 1950s New York exhibition, rendered in crisp black and white with the spare typography of a mid-century American gallery announcement. The monochrome treatment suits the bronze, throwing the contours of the figure into sculptural relief.

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