PARIS.- Auguste Rodin is best known as the sculptor who reshaped modern sculpture, but a newly opened exhibition reminds us that his true laboratory was often paper. On view from December 13, 2025, through March 1, 2026, Rodin. Free Drawings brings together nearly 70 works from the museum’s own holdings to reveal a restless, experimental draftsman who never stopped reinventing his visual language.
Rodin once said, “My drawings are the key to my work,” and the exhibition takes that statement seriously. Drawn from a collection of some 7,000 sheets preserved by the museum, these works trace the artist’s lifelong relationship with drawing—from his formative years to the luminous, color-saturated sheets of his final decades. Rather than presenting drawings as preparatory studies, the exhibition frames them as autonomous works, places where Rodin tested ideas with a freedom he rarely allowed himself in sculpture.
The presentation unfolds across six thematic sections that move fluidly between chronology and style. Early drawings reveal a young artist steeped in classical models, obsessively copying antiquities and studying Renaissance masters at the Louvre. This early immersion in antiquity never left him; it remained a quiet but persistent current throughout his career.
Architecture soon entered his visual thinking. Sketchbooks filled with cathedrals, cornices, and shafts of light testify to Rodin’s belief that buildings, like bodies, possess an inner structure and rhythm. His fascination with Gothic architecture ultimately culminated in The Cathedrals of France (1914), but its roots are already visible in these quick, searching drawings.
One of the exhibition’s most intense moments comes with the so-called “black drawings,” inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy. Executed in layered graphite, ink, and gouache, these dark visions abandon narrative detail in favor of raw emotional force. Twisted bodies, screaming mouths, and engulfing shadows reveal a Rodin drawn to the extremes of human experience.
In the 1890s, his approach shifted again. Turning to live models who moved freely through his studio, Rodin sought what he called the “right gesture.” These so-called “transition drawings,” marked by pink and yellow washes, strip the body down to motion and energy, dissolving the boundary between observation and invention.
Assemblage became another key strategy. Rodin cut, traced, inverted, and recombined figures, treating drawing much as he treated sculpture—through repetition, fragmentation, and transformation. A single female form might reappear as a mythological figure, an abstract shape, or even an object, resisting any fixed meaning.
Color dominates the final section. In his later years, Rodin embraced watercolor with increasing boldness, allowing chance, fluidity, and saturation to guide the image. These works, sometimes bordering on abstraction, anticipate artistic questions that would only fully emerge in the twentieth century.
Rather than nostalgia, Rodin. Free Drawings offers a portrait of an artist in perpetual motion. Drawing, like sculpture, was for Rodin a space of risk and discovery—a place where form, gesture, and color could remain unresolved. Seen together, these sheets reveal not a side practice, but the beating heart of Rodin’s modernity.
