EVE (1895) Bronze Statue Sculpture by Auguste Rodin Nude Female Figure 32" x 11"

 Along with this beauty is a deep seriousness of intent. Subjects are never trifling. The body is for him a medium of expression to convey ancient and weighty themes of life and death, action and repose, alienation and reconciliation. Figures are not abstracted — as later artists like Picasso or Giacometti would do — but literally pared down. The “Large Torso of the Falling Man” (1904) lacks arms, legs, head, and neck, as if to test how much expression he could wring from how little of the body, in the process both referencing and one-upping the power and fragmentation of the famous classical “Torso Belvedere.” Within his expressive vocabulary, Rodin uses the male and female body very differently. Looking at Rodin’s work in comparison with David’s “Oath of the Horatii” (1784) — a foundational image in the French Academy — we can see that his male figures have evolved from pugilistic sword-wielding clones into thoughtful, even poetic individuals (“Age of Bronze,” 1877; “Thinker”) but his women continue to signify through sensuality and pathos. His main innovation is to heighten the reality of their sexuality. In some sculptures, he replaces the smooth pubic triangle that has served as the cipher for female genitals in Western art since the Ancient Greeks with a lifelike pudenda that sometimes even winks open at the viewer, as in “Iris, Messenger of the Gods” (c. 1895).