ROdin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture

New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010
During his lifetime, Auguste Rodin’s name became synonymous with modern sculpture. It also became linked with sex: “Desire! What a formidable stimulant,” he once remarked. Rodin came to emphasize the importance of desire and the sexual as the markers of his individual perspective, using them to fuel his increasingly daring treatments of the nude. Bodily passion became the primary means through which he sought to make sculpture evocative, expressive, and universally appealing. Concurrently, Rodin staged his own acts of making through the manipulation of sculptural techniques, prompting viewers to imagine the scenes of the creation of his objects in the studio. In the minds of many viewers, the dramatic and activated surfaces came to be seen as evidence of not just a sculptor’s touch but a lover’s touch as well.

David Getsy examines these developments by focusing on two pivotal moments in Rodin’s career: first, 1876, the year his work is catalyzed through an engagement with Michelangelo; and, second, 1900, the year of the one-person exhibition that catapulted him to international public notoriety. This book makes a case for reconsidering the terms of Rodin’s influence, arguing that the sculptor placed renewed emphasis on the materiality and objecthood of sculpture as a means of asserting his own desire’s inseparability from his works. In his analysis of this practice, Getsy offers a critical account of the origins of modern sculpture and how sex became a key term in Rodin’s making of it.

FROM THE REVIEWS
”David Getsy’s compelling, lavishly illustrated, and subtly polemical book, Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture, sets out to unpack the role and function of sexuality in Rodin’s work and legacy.” – Monty Paret, caa.erviews

"Getsy's Rodin throws brilliant light on the matter [of the sculptor's use of sex], as much amusing as instructive... in subject utterly concentrated, this is a revealing book."
– Brian Sewell, The Evening Standard, December 2010

"This is an important book presenting arguments that are of great interest for the study of sculpture and of modernism generally [....] Getsy has established himself as one of our leading scholars of late-19th-century sculpture."
– Cassone

"Bizzarely contemporary [....] Getsy's book is a refreshing counterpoint to the impressive archive-based research of the last twenty years, [and] his arguments are totally worth listening to"
– Burlington Magazine

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