Rodin’s Dancers: Art and Performance in Belle Époque Paris

Charting Auguste Rodin’s relationships with the dancers who shaped his signature style and his mythic persona.

Juliet Bellow traces Rodin’s interactions with dance makers and performers during his late career (1890-1912) through a series of interrelated case studies. His exchanges with Loïe Fuller, Vaslav Nijinsky, and members of the Cambodian Royal Ballet troupe were central to Rodin’s development of a modern sculptural aesthetic and the construction of his artistic celebrity. But this was not a simple case of one-way influence. These performers actively courted an affiliation with Rodin, wielding sculpture’s cultural authority to move dance from the realm of commercial entertainment to that of ＂high art.＂

Bringing together art history and performance studies, Rodin’s Dancers demonstrates that in their search for innovation, dancers and sculptors experimented with one another’s means of expression, sites of display, and techniques of publicity. The book provides more than a new interpretation of Rodin’s art: it considers how and why the name ＂Rodin＂ came to stand for a powerful constellation of ideas about art, authorship, and creative genius within the vibrant spectacle culture of Belle Époque Paris.

Juliet Bellow is Associate Professor of Art History at American University. She is author of Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde and served as a Consulting Scholar for the 2013 exhibition ’Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced With Music’ at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She has published articles in the Art Bulletin and Art Journal, among others, and contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Ballet as well as international exhibition catalogues on Sonia Delaunay, Merce Cunningham and Henri Matisse.