cover image Auguste Rodin: Erotic Watercolors

Auguste Rodin: Erotic Watercolors

Auguste Rodin, Anne Marie Bonnet. Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, $60 (160pp) ISBN 978-1-55670-428-4

Rodin's sculptures, charged with concentrated energy, muscular action and drama, seem worlds apart from these 107 delicate, quick, spontaneous erotic watercolors of female nudes, painted from the late 1890s up to his death in 1917. Posing in various contortions, and captured explicitly in soft, glowing colors, his women are all contours, silhouettes, crevices, supple lines. Most of them are virtually faceless, and no attempt has been made to portray the models as individuals. There are lesbian couples as well as classic or mythological studies, some rendered phantasmagorically, in a manner suggestive of Odilon Redon. Others, in their confrontational stances, call to mind Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele. This volume will appeal to connoisseurs of erotic art. In her introduction, University of Leipzig art historian Bonnet observes that several of these watercolors created a scandal when first exhibited in a Weimar museum in 1906. (Dec.)