A simple sculptor or an apostle of perversion? The Royal Academy's spectacular assembly of Rodin's work helps to disentangle his genius from the gush of his admirers

With no fewer than 374 items on the menu, and no shortage of sculptural 'beefsteak', as Constantin Brancusi would have put it, 'Rodin' brings a visual feast to the Royal Academy. The installation is starkly elegant and the catalogue is little short of sumptuous. The Rodin story is a romantic one; not quite rags to riches, but a struggle to success nonetheless. Had he died aged 40, he would be forgotten. Two of his sculptures are world famous, The Thinker and The Kiss. His Honore de Balzac monument was a media sensation and his erotic drawings angered my politically correct students 15 years ago. Opinions of Rodin, like those of Michelangelo or Picasso, are in constant flux. He is awesome, he can be awful, but he is never boring. From the 1880s he was subjected to a devoted and effusive cult following, which included his sometime secretary, Rainer Maria Rilke; the decadent, sadomasochistic writers Octave Mirbeau and J.K. Huysmans, and Oscar Wilde. By contrast, George Bernard Shaw (exhibited here as a disarmingly lifelike head) deplored the 'ludicrous cackle and piffle' surrounding Rodin. At times, the curators, particularly Catherine Lampert, should have heeded Shaw, rather than quoting uncritically from hero-worshippers.

Rodin's early years are treated relatively lightly; I would have willingly exchanged one of the three casts of Man with a Broken Nose for the lovely terracotta Young Woman in a Flowered Hat (1865, Musee Rodin, Paris), a portrait of Rose Beuret, his mistress, drudge and eventually wife. The momentum really gathers with The Age of Bronze (1877, Victoria and Albert Museum, London) onwards. When we see this sculpture photographed alongside other French state purchases of the time, its unacademic realism still seems startling. Its successor, St John the Baptist Preaching (1879, Victoria and Albert Museum, London), does new things in turn. The half-open mouth, the declamatory hands and above all the vigorous forward motion, inflict the statue onto the viewer. Rodin's commitment to sculpture in motion is shown in the related Walking Man (c. 1900, Musee Bourdelle, Paris), whose radical truncation reveals how, as the sculptor put it, 'you don't need a head to walk!' A bronze statuette version of this work is placed in 'Rodin and the Antique', a highly successful section of the exhibition. It shows his collecting interests to be visual rather than scholarly, an artist's choice, and reveals how he saw new possibilities in the exploitation of the fragment for his own work.

Major emphasis is rightly given to The Burghers of Calais (Fig. 3) and its many studies. The commission was originally for only one figure, Eustache de St-Pierre (Fig. 4), who bows his head with dignified restraint. The man behind him surrenders to despair, while the young man hauntingly looks back and thinks of all that he leaves behind. The sequence of the action is circular, beginning with St-Pierre's resolute step forward, and passes through the varying emotions of the other figures and back again to him as they move forward. Again, Rodin defies convention: to his contemporaries the sculpture was not heroic enough. Large, complex compositions were rarely Rodin's forte, but The Burghers of Calais is a wonderful exception, effective, affecting and psychologically modern.

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The Gates of Hell (1880-1917) stands at the centre of Rodin's career and is displayed in the Royal Academy's courtyard. Great claims were made of it by the Rodin scholar Albert Elsen, who described it as 'among the most powerful and important works of art of the 19th century'. Rodin poured his creative energies into the work, and its nearly 200 constituent figures form the basis of his most significant independent sculptures. Yet the totality leaves critical opinion split. According to Frank Rutter, Rodin did not 'appear to have any clear conception of the Gates as a whole with all its parts in ordered relation to each other'. From the outset, writers and journalists were attracted to it. Mirbeau's interpretation transformed Rodin--a robust workman with a shrewd and penetrating eye, who never really claimed that his works were more than illustrations to Dante or the Bible--into an apostle of perversion, pessimism, pain and (although Lampert would never admit it) pretentiousness.

Yet aspects of the Gates are excellent, not least The Thinker, whose full-size version in marble dramatically looms above us in the Central Hall. Who is he? There is an element of idealised self-portraiture, although Rodin was short and stock. The Thinker was politicised in the late 19th century, when socialist propaganda romanticised and monumentalised the working-class man. Or is he Adam, the first man, and therefore open to Christian interpretation? Art-historical precedents from Michelangelo to Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (the latter virtually ignored in the catalogue) are easily identifiable. Yet the originality and complexity of Rodin's composition are often overlooked: the body is unnaturally twisted so that the right elbow is supported on the left knee, resulting in a contortion that gives the form physical and psychological intensity. The Kiss (1900-1904), originally intended for the Gates of Hell but also revamped as a self-contained work, celebrates love attained and reciprocated. Rodin supervised its carving with a closeness that makes the work his own. Indeed, he exerted closer control than he did on the many, often posthumously cast, bronzes, which are sensibly excluded from the exhibition. Marble is the perfect material for exploring the textural contrasts between the sensuous and soft woman's body and the man's firmer flesh. Significant, too, is the way the figures emerge from the deliberately unfinished marble. That said, the surface quality of the carving fails to match the beauty of the conception, something more effectively demonstrated in the smaller, more intimate Love the Conqueror (Fig. 1). Here, the sense of enclosure anticipates Henry Moore's fascination with internal and external forms 50 years later.