Monument to Balzac (1892-97) 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.
Kenneth Clark considered it the greatest statue of the nineteenth century, the greatest since Michelangelo. It was a statue hated in its day. People literally shook their fists at it. The reason Rodin’s Balzac made people so angry, Lord Clark said, “was the feeling that he could gobble them up, and didn’t care a damn for their opinion. Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives, scorns conventional values, defies fashionable opinion... 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.”
