Overview

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.

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9780300275162

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Reviews

'Rodin’s Dancers is a beautifully designed and visually stunning book. Bellow’s meticulous and kinaesthetically astute research provides a rich interdisciplinary study of the aesthetic dialogues between the plastic arts and expressive movement in the early twentieth century. A must-read.’ - Ann Cooper Albright, Professor of Dance, Oberlin College, and author of Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller ‘This paradigm-shifting book radically transforms how we understand Rodin and the dancers he sculpted and studied. Its explosion of traditional hierarchies of art, gender and politics yields revelations that will dazzle even experts. Juliet Bellow’s multidisciplinary study is a tour de force.’ - Carol Ockman, Robert Sterling Clark Professor of Art History, Emerita, Williams College, and co-author of Sarah Bernhardt: The Art of High Drama ‘Juliet Bellow’s new book on dance, dancers and Auguste Rodin’s sculpture is a model of interdisciplinary potential, exemplifying the synergies between performance and sculpture studies. While Rodin is at the centre, this thoughtful study expands centrifugally to address the cultural, artistic, sexual and political debates of early twentieth-century France. Combining substantive research with novel questions, Bellow not only gives new views of Rodin and his sculpture: she also argues that modernity was made by moving bodies.’ - David J. Getsy, Eleanor Shea Professor of Art History, University of Virginia, and author of Rodin: Sex and the Making of Modern Sculpture ‘Remarkable for its meticulous archival research and its rigorous interdisciplinarity, Rodin’s Dancers offers a compelling argument about the reciprocal but never symmetrical relationships between Rodin and the dance artists who shaped his later work.’ - Anthea Kraut, Professor of Dance, University of California, Riverside, and author of Choreographing Copyright: Race, Gender, and Intellectual Property Rights in American Dance​ ‘Rodin’s Dancers succeeds brilliantly as both cultural history and as a sustained feat of visual analysis and reflection. Juliet Bellow recovers the agency and autonomy of the dancers as participants in an open-ended exchange with the famous sculptor, albeit one framed by unequal power structures.’ - Dr Tom Stammers, Reader in Art and Cultural History, The Courtauld Institute, University of London, and author of The Purchase of the Past: Collecting Culture in Post-Revolutionary Paris c. 1790–1890​

Author Information

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.  

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