The need for an investigation of Auguste Rodin’s influence on American artists was spawned at the 2002 symposium, “New Studies on Rodin,” held on the occasion of the publication of Albert Elsen’s monumental catalogue of Stanford’s Rodin Collection. How did American artists adopt, adapt, or reject Rodin’s art? What were the attributes in their work that reflected the master’s oeuvre? Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center was the ideal place for this study, with the third largest Rodin collection in the world, including two hundred works—mostly cast bronze, but also works in wax, plaster, and terra cotta—on view in three galleries and outdoors. The result is the exhibition Rodin and America: Influence and Adaptation, 1876–1936, led by Bernard Barryte, Curator of European Art.

Barryte assembled a cast of collaborators to launch the exploration, including Ilene Susan Fort, curator of American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Bronwyn A. E. Griffith, an independent scholar specializing in American sculpture; Hélène Pinet, archivist at the Musée Rodin; independent scholar Anna Tahinci, a specialist on American patronage of Rodin; and Jennifer Jane Marshall, assistant professor at the University of Minnesota. They considered the commonalities and divergences among the artists who were challenged by Rodin, the formal and thematic innovations of a generation of American artists responding to Rodin, and a group of neglected artists whose work deserved reconsideration. They also served as quasi-cocurators of the exhibition, providing suggestions and scholarship for the 107 sculptures, drawings, paintings, and photographs by 42 artists from 44 museums, foundations, and private collections throughout the United States. In addition, the exhibition features 25 of Rodin’s works in bronze, plaster, marble, and watercolor.

Rodin and America spans the time between the first showing of Rodin’s work in the United States at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, and the period after his death in 1917. The focus is on the first decades of the twentieth century when Rodin’s influence was at its height. The exhibition’s well-conceived wall texts and art labels (which include photos of the artists) provide little-known facts about Rodin, his friendships and acquaintances, and how he and others crafted a kind of transatlantic celebrity cult. Organized in somewhat confusing and redundant themes—the partial figure, the non finito, eroticism, portraits and monuments, drawing, earliest American collectors, the engaged figure, suggested motion, and culture hero—the exhibition includes American icons such as John Singer Sargent, Alfred Stieglitz, Charles Demuth, Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Steichen, Man Ray, and Alexander Calder; sculptors Gaston Lachaise and John Storrs; photographers Berenice Abbott, Anne W. Brigman, and Lee Miller; and a host of lesser-known artists usually relegated to art-history footnotes. Among them are sculptor George Grey Barnard, whom Rodin greatly admired; Gutzon Borglum, artist of the Mount Rushmore portraits; and Lorado Taft, whose platformed life-size bronze cast of a figure group titled The Blind is indebted to Rodin’s Burghers of Calais (1884).

In the outstanding catalogue accompanying the exhibition, Thomas K. Seligman, Cantor Center’s John and Jill Freidenrich retiring director, writes that artists’ encounters with Rodin were characterized as a tipping point in their understanding and application of the experimentations defining early modernism. Rodin’s relationship with America was inaugurated in the Philadelphia exhibition where eight sculptures were displayed in the Belgian section. Four decades later he had established international recognition, with exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States and a devoted group of collectors from Tokyo to Berlin. In 1912 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, established an entire gallery for his art. Rodin’s effective use of the press helped create and cement his celebrity status and cultivate an international clientele. Writers and artists flocked to his studio and wrote of their experiences in American journals and newspapers. The first sections of the exhibition include several portraits of Rodin, including two stunning depictions by John Singer Sargent, an oil on canvas from 1884, and a pen-and-ink drawing from 1902 of the artist reading. John White Alexander’s enormous full-length portrait from 1899 captures Rodin wearing the red rosette Légion d’Honneur pin attesting to his recently elevated stature in French culture.

Rodin’s artistic innovations were profound and captured the imagination of artists of his generation and beyond. His ability to express the character and soul of his subjects—“a deeper truth,” as described by writers of his time—reached its pinnacle in the Burghers of Calais. Represented in the exhibition by the first maquette, cast in bronze posthumously, Burghers still ignites the imagination. Rodin’s naturalistic approach, dynamic forms, emotional richness, sensuality, and complex surfaces recall Michelangelo, one of his muses. Captivated by the Renaissance master’s unfinished pieces, as well as by broken relics of antiquity he saw in Italy, Rodin deliberately left portions of his human figures and sculptural groups unfinished. The exhibition includes several sculptors whose work reflects Rodin’s use of non finito, such as Malvina Hoffman’s marble portrait of her mother (1918) and Borglum’s marble carving, Grief of Motherhood (ca. 1902–14), in which he conveyed Rodin-like emotional and physical anguish through the figure’s posture and sharply angled limbs.

Rodin’s personal collection of photographs numbered more than 7,000, and among his favorite photographers were Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Adolf de Meyer. Steichen took many photographs of Rodin’s sculpture in progress, and Rodin, in turn, used them to help him complete his work, sometimes drawing directly on the images. Steichen promoted Rodin in the United States by placing his drawings and watercolors in avant-garde exhibitions and publications such as Camera Work. While many artists traveled to Paris to meet Rodin, others were dependent on American collections, galleries, museums, and journals. For the latter, he was the subject of innumerable interviews. In fact, patronage and publications were key elements in the dissemination of Rodin’s innovations. Rodin’s work eventually reached younger photographers such as Man Ray and Miller, and even Brigman in California. The many photographs in the exhibition are among the most compelling images, especially Steichen’s The Awakening (1901). Steichen’s arresting series of photographs depicting Rodin’s Balzac (represented in the exhibition by the 1897 Final Study for “Monument to Honoré de Balzac”) are reminiscent of later Surrealist photography. He spent two entire nights from sunset to sunrise creating the photos, and the resulting images prompted Rodin to write him, “You will make the world understand my Balzac through these pictures.” He expressed his gratitude further by giving Steichen a bronze sculpture cast of The Walking Man. Three of the Balzac photogravures from 1911—The Open Sky; Toward the Light, Midnight; and The Silhouette, 4 a.m.—are displayed in the exhibition.

Rodin’s fragmented figures inspired Stieglitz’s more than three hundred photographs of O’Keeffe, represented in the exhibition by several gelatin silver prints, among them the stunning Georgia O’Keeffe—Hand (1918) and Georgia O’Keeffe—Neck (1921). These close-up hand portraits are echoed in Man Ray’s The Hands of Charles Demuth (1921) and Abbott’s Cocteau’s Hands (1927). The provocative qualities of fragment portrayal are exquisitely represented in Miller’s Nude Bent Forward and Man Ray’s Prayer, both gelatin silver prints from 1930.

Two women also played a pivotal role in promoting Rodin’s celebrity and popularity with American collectors—Loïe Fuller and Hoffman. Fuller, an American avant-garde dancer, was responsible for bringing a major collection to Northern California on the occasion of the 1915 Panama Pacific Exposition. Not only did she persuade Rodin to send the works to the exposition, but she also persuaded Alma Spreckels to amass one of the largest collections of Rodin’s work and to deposit it at her new museum, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, which opened in 1924. Fuller arranged for Rodin’s first solo exhibition in the United States at the National Arts Club in New York in May 1903, and also helped Samuel Hill with his purchases for Maryhill, his home in rural Washington State, which became a museum upon his death. When Fuller died in 1928, Hoffman stepped in. She had met Rodin in 1910, and after failing five times to study with him, she succeeded and eventually become a true friend. When he was ill in 1914, she took his place in installing his works in the Duke of Westminster’s home in London. She also helped organize his 5,000 drawings. In addition to assisting him in his studio, where she often sketched him at work, she helped him gain patronage in the United States. She put him in touch with Henry Frick, and in 1915, while acting on his behalf to sell The Age of Bronze, she suggested that he exhibit in her New York studio. After Rodin’s death, Hoffman continued to serve as his emissary, and by the eve of World War II, it was possible to see a strong representation of his work in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Maryhill.

The accompanying catalogue to Rodin and America is exemplary in its insightful essays, beautifully reproduced color and black-and-white illustrations, and handsome bronzed chapter dividers that suggest Rodin’s favorite medium. As with many long-in-development exhibitions, the scholarly show is enlivened and deepened by this book, which should serve scholars for years to come. A few examples of the outstanding catalogue essays follow. Jennifer Jane Marshall explores the interwar-era backlash to dethrone Rodin. The criticism came from two camps—conservative voices in art criticism, including F. W. Ruckstull, who referred to Rodin’s art as a “social menace,” and progressive artists, such as Alexander Archipenko, Elie Nadelman, and John Bradley Storrs, who sought to distance themselves from Rodin’s brand of modernism. They viewed his experience-based modernism as “romantic” and criticized his unchecked self-indulgence; nevertheless, their work still bares traces of his legacy. Antoinette Le Norman-Romain contributes an essay detailing the 1950s Rodin revival in the United States championed by art historians Albert E. Elsen and Leo Steinberg. Anna Tahinci’s essay is enhanced by a valuable listing of Rodin’s American collectors in his lifetime, including their names, dates of commissions, title and medium of works, and prices. A sequel to the Rodin and America study, as critic Kenneth Baker has suggested (Kenneth Baker, “‘Rodin and America’: Window to Artists of His Time,” San Francisco Chronicle [October 8, 2011]: E–1), might include additional artists to elucidate the impact of Rodin on art of the second half of the twentieth century.