Auguste Rodin: Images of Desire

With his erotic nude studies Auguste Rodin completed the artistic step towards modernity during the last two decades of his life. To a greater extent than in his sculptural œuvre he broke with art traditions in his pencil drawings, watercolors and drawings combined with scissor cuts, establishing his total independence of prevalent beauty ideals and morals. The intimate character is born out by the expeditious stroke, comparable to instantaneous snapshots, and the liberality of the motifs. Contemporaries such as Rilke and Paul Klee immediately recognized the revolutionary artistic quality of the drawings. The price Harry Graf Kessler had to pay for exhibiting them in Weimar 1906 was high, however: he was dismissed from his position as head of the Grand-Ducal museum. This book, a softcover reprint of our 1995 classic, contains 105 watercolors and scissor cuts collected from museums and private collections from all over the world, including some "scandal" drawings from Weimar.