AUGUSTE RODIN

(1840-1917)

Femme nue assise, de profil vers la droite, une jambe pliée

Footnotes

The authenticity of this work has kindly been confirmed by Madame Christina Buley-Uribe. This work will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné des dessins et peintures d'Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), currently being prepared.

Provenance
Giancarlo Baroni Collection, Paris; his estate sale, Sotheby's, New York, 29 January 2013, lot 63.
Private collection, London (acquired at the above sale).

Auguste Rodin's works on paper formed a key element of his oeuvre, existing as works in their own right alongside his three-dimensional corpus. What united these two strands of Rodin's artistic output was his focus upon capturing the essence of his subjects, articulated through an increasing simplification of form. Rodin achieved this whilst simultaneously looking to the Old Masters, of whom he considered himself a student. Femme nue assise, de profil vers la droite, une jambe pliée, dated circa 1896, issues from a unique series of works on paper. This series, according to Christina Buley-Uribe, is closely related to the group of 32 Rodin drawings discovered at the Musée Clemenceau. The works have a light quality to them which we know from the preservation of the Clemenceau drawings was Rodin's intention. Similarly, the works are unsigned, which according to Christina Buley-Uribe indicate that they were unlikely to have been exhibited during Rodin's lifetime and that they were more likely to have been gifted by the artist.

Sitting with her left hand holding the left leg and supporting her upright seated position, the pose of the woman in the present work deliberately eschews aesthetic tradition. Works on paper from this period were created concurrently with Rodin's studies for the sculpture of Balzac and share the same experimental approach. Backlash against the rejection of this work proved to be a watershed moment for Modernism as an artistic movement, and indeed the canon of art history. Contemporary critics similarly disparaged Rodin's drawings for what they regarded as their incompleteness. However, here we see Rodin demonstrating the boldly modern technique of signifying presence through absence, striving to produce a more authentic rendering of the model through the purposeful use of fewer lines.