H. de Roos - Rodin´s Approach to Art

20. A private Art? 

Although some of his later drawings are published, as illustrations to Octave Mirbeau´s poem Garden of Torments (Jardin des Supplices) and others are exhibited in Weimar in 1906, where their erotic content leads to the dismissal of the Director of the Museum, Count Kessler, Rodin tends to present this work only to a selected public, to avoid any further scandal. Both his new way of drawing and his increasing partiality for the accidental and incomplete in sculpture may be understood as an attempt to pursue a more personal, intimate mode of creativity.

Dance Study E, Plaster

Towards 1900, Rodin had become one of the most famous artists of his time. In his atelier, his praticiens produced large numbers of marble sculptures for a growing number of collectors; in 1898, the Barbedienne foundry started to issue a mass edition of The Kiss and Eternal Springtime in bronze; in 1904 his assistant Lebossé completed a monumental enlargement of The Thinker, that was cast in bronze and was placed in front of the Panthéon in April 1906 and other places world-wide.

It is very well possible that Rodin, in the midst of this grandiose public success, finally accepted and honoured by the artistic establishment, supervising a large staff of assistants and craftsmen, sought to preserve his creative integrity and continued to explore his individual vision of vitality in small-scale work, like the portrait busts, the drawings and the little dance studies he took up in 1911, modelled in the same free, intuitive way.