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Juliet Bellow, Rodin’s Dancers: Art and Performance in Belle Époque Paris. New Haven and London. Yale University Press, 2025. 256 pp. 105 color illus. $60.00. ISBN 978-0-300-27516-2.
Review essay by Susan Waller, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Through case studies of three performers—Loïe Fuller, Vaslav Nijinsky and the Cambodian Royal Ballet—Juliet Bellow’s Rodin’s Dancers: Art and Performance in Belle Époque Paris traces Auguste Rodin’s late-career engagement with dance, exploring how the exchanges were pivotal to developing his modern sculptural aesthetic and securing his artistic celebrity.
Bellow situates her inquiry in a nuanced account of conditions in the dance world. Ballet, the dominant established form, was widely considered moribund and vulgar, while innovative modern modes and non-Western genres competed for public attention and critical legitimacy. For performers seeking to elevate their practice, representation by visual artists whose work was canonized within high art traditions offered a compelling strategy for cultural legitimation. Rodin was drawn to this exchange for his own reasons: on the model, stand the exaggerated, expressive attitudes of dancers’ trained bodies pushed his practice in productive new directions, even as he carefully weighed how association with popular performers might reflect on his public standing and artistic legacy.
Bellow pursues dual objectives: to trace the impact of the dancers on the formal development of Rodin’s work and to restore the agency and contributions of the performers whom Rodin represented. It is this latter objective that I want to consider here. Conventional accounts of artistic production routinely reduce the model to the object of the artist’s gaze or a stationary and silent muse. Only recently have models’ active contribution to artistic production begun to receive sustained consideration by art historians in landmark exhibitions such as Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today.[1] Bellow’s approach extends this project in an important direction by probing the contributions of models who brought to the artist’s studio a repertoire of gestures developed for their own staged performances.
Reconsidering dancers as Rodin’s collaborators, rather than the passive objects of his aesthetic gaze, necessarily entails decentering the sculptor’s mythologized persona as a singular creative genius. This approach runs counter to longstanding art historical disciplinary conventions, but Rodin is, in many respects, the ideal figure for such a methodological experiment. From early in his career, the sculptor’s engagement with the model challenged the customary practice of the pose, and accounts of his unconventional methods became central to his carefully cultivated public persona. In 1877, as he developed the standing male figure that would mark his Salon debut, Rodin shunned professional models in favor of a young soldier, Auguste Neyt, who later recalled their collaborative process of arriving at the attitude that served as the basis for the sculpture: “Rodin did not want to force the muscles; he had a particular horror of the academic ‘pose’… The master wanted a ‘natural’ action taken from life.”[2] In 1889, Rodin explained that the pose of St. John the Baptist was based on an attitude spontaneously assumed by the model, César Pignatelli, at the moment he mounted the model stand, and in later interviews and conversations he consistently elaborated on the idea that his practice was driven by models’ impromptu gestures.[3]
As Bellow recounts, Loïe Fuller, the American performer considered a pioneer of modern dance, very much wanted Rodin to represent her in sculpture, but he “never depicted Fuller directly in his art” (p. 38). A number of other notable artists did represent Fuller, including Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Jules Chéret, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, but it seems unlikely these works were based on poses the dancer assumed on the model stand.[4] The iconic images show her as she appeared on stage, veils billowing around her body to conjure abstract forms evoking butterflies or flowers. Fuller did routinely restage her performances or mount a model stand for photographers: photographs produced with brief exposure times readily captured ephemeral effects and could serve as a substitute for the live model. It was likely these images that enabled the creators of posters, prints, and decorative works to represent her, often reimagining her as a showgirl whose torso was revealed through a swirl of transparent fabric.
Bellow documents how Fuller provided Rodin with many of these photographs in an effort to persuade him to represent her in sculptural form, but the single work by Rodin that Bellow identifies as a possible representation of the dancer is a drawing of a nude figure enveloped in a spiraling veil. Since the figure’s face has been struck out, it is impossible to be certain it represents Fuller. Bellow attributes Rodin’s evident reluctance to portray Fuller to his disinclination to be associated with the multitude of trivial, mass-produced ornamental objects depicting the dancer. But might Rodin’s hesitancy not also have been prompted by his disdain for photographic images of nature and his insistence that he could only work from direct observation of the living body?[5]
Nonetheless, Bellow demonstrates that the photographs that Fuller presented to Rodin proved generative in other and perhaps more fundamental ways. She contends that photographs taken from innovative angles that employed lighting effects drawn from Fuller’s sophisticated mastery of stagecraft provided a stimulus to Rodin’s arrangement of photographs of his sculpture. Bellow presses the argument further, proposing that Rodin’s innovative installation of his pavilion at the 1900 Exposition Universelle was directly inspired by Fuller’s distinctive command of lighting, movement, and dramatic spatial framing to animate his static works in a manner evocative of his encounters with his models in the studio. The fruitful nature of their exchange as explored by Bellow recapitulates the broad pattern of interdisciplinary dialogue between artists working across different media.
Bellow’s second case study examines Rodin’s encounter with the dancers of the Cambodian Royal Ballet, who were invited to perform at the Exhibition Coloniale in Marseille in 1906. The dancers posed in person for an extensive series of drawings and watercolors. Yet the difficulties involved in recovering the dancers’ agency are considerable, as Bellow acknowledges.
Most significant among the challenges are the gaps in the archival record. The images, as Bellow argues, constituted “sites of negotiation” between the French sculptor, the Cambodian dancers, the colonial ministry and King Sisowath, each party bringing distinct investments to the exchange (p. 100). The archive, however, does not represent their views equally: no record survives of the dancers’ perspective on the encounter. This silence is a dilemma routinely confronting scholars who seek to recover the identities and experiences of individual nineteenth century models. Neyt’s recollections of posing for Rodin are exceptional.
A second obstacle to reconstructing encounters between artist and model is the inherent ephemerality of the pose, but because the attitudes the Cambodian dancers assumed before Rodin were drawn from their repertoire, there is a foundation for re-envisioning their poses. Bellow’s reconstruction of the performances draws on analytical frameworks by anthropologists, the current forms of the traditional dances and her own background in performance to develop a vivid and compelling account of how Rodin’s gestural drawings engage with the dancers’ specific attitudes and performances.
Bellow’s final case study addresses Rodin’s engagement with Vaslav Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun and the scandal and four artworks it generated. The controversy surrounding Nijinsky’s production for the Ballets Russes and Rodin’s defense of it has been related often; accounts differ in their details but agree that the first provocation was the dancer’s autoerotic choreography.[6] A newspaper editorial signed by Rodin—which Bellow argues reflects the sculptor’s views, though some attribute it to Roger Marx—praised Nijinsky’s performance and his stiff and archaizing attitudes. The backlash that Rodin’s support provoked focused on the sculptor’s own sexualized public persona and, in the polarized climate of the Third Republic, jeopardized his effort to secure the Hôtel Biron as a permanent home for his art.
Rodin’s representations of Nijinsky, which originated in his attendance at the ballet’s dress rehearsal and a subsequent studio visit by the dancer, include three drawings and a small sculpture. The drawings are summary sketches which the Musée Rodin initially identified as representations of female models; Bellow was the first to link them to the dancer and Afternoon of a Faun.[7] The close analysis of the drawings developed in her dissertation associated them with Nijinsky’s stiff, archaizing choreography.
In Rodin’s Dancers, however, Bellow sets aside this analytical lens to argue for the figures’ gender ambiguity, building upon arguments by dance historians that Nijinsky’s stage presence in Ballets Russes productions flaunted an ambiguous sexuality.[8] The drawings served, according to Bellow, as preparatory studies for a single small sculpture which she argues persuasively was never intended to be presented mounted on a static base but was conceived to be held and rotated in the viewer’s hands, presenting a series of views that recapitulate the sequential logic of Nijinsky’s choreography. Underlying the analysis is her reliance on a rumor that Nijinsky’s visit to Rodin’s studio included a homoerotic encounter between dancer and sculptor: the experience of fondling it, she suggests, recreates Rodin’s erotic engagement with his model.[9]
Neither Nijinsky nor Fuller have been neglected in histories of dance, but Bellow’s analysis, a model of interdisciplinary scholarship, opens new avenues for considering not only Rodin’s oeuvre but the concepts of male authorship and creative exchange.
Susan Waller
University of Missouri-St. Louis
wallersu@umsl.edu
Notes
[1] Denise Murrell, Posing Modernity: The Black Model from Manet and Matisse to Today (New Haven, New York: Yale University Press; in association with the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University in the City of New York, 2018). Exhibition catalog.
[2] Ruth Butler, Rodin: The Shape of Genius (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 99-100; quoted from Frédéric de Smet, “Rodin et les Gantois,” Gand Artistique 1/4 (1 April 1922): 46: “Rodin ne voulait pas forcer les muscles, il avait horreur précisement de la ‘pose’ académique… Le maître voulait l’action ‘naturelle’ prise sur le vif.” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433084256142&seq=106&q1=Neyt
[3] T. H. Bartlett, “Auguste Rodin: The Sculptor,” The American Architect and Building News 25/701 (1 June 1889): 261, as in Albert E. Elsen, Auguste Rodin: Readings in His Life and Work (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall), p. 96; Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Jessie Lamont (New York: Sunrise Turn Inc., 1919), p. 55.
[4] Rhonda K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loïe Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), pp.167-70.
[5] Auguste Rodin and Paul Gsell, On Art and Artists (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 91; Elsen, Auguste Rodin, p. 81.
[6] Martine Kahane, John Neumeier, Erik Näslund, William A. Emboden, Marina Ferretti, Daniel Gesmer, Millicent Hodson, Hamburger Ballett, Dansmuseet (Stockholm, Sweden), and Musée d’Orsay, Nijinsky 1889-1950: 23 Octobre 2000-18 Février 2001, Musée d’Orsay (Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 2000), Exhibition catalogue, pp. 98-99; Joy Newton, “Rodin and Nijinsky,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 114/131 (Sept. 1989): 100-104.
[7] Juliet Bellow, “‘Reforming Dance’: Auguste Rodin’s Nijinsky and Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune,” Cantor Arts Center Journal 3 (2002-3): 180-81, 172-83.
[8] Lynn Garafola, “The Sexual Iconography of the Ballets Russes,” Ballet Review 28/3 (2000): 70-77.
[9] An alternative account of the studio visit, which discounts the homoerotic encounter, is presented by Ursel Berger, “Three Sculptors and a dancer: Nijinsky’s relations with Maillol, Rodin and Kolbe,” Apollo 156/490 (Nov. 2002): 42-49.
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H-France Forum
Volume 21 (2026), Issue 4, #3
https://doi.org/10.66242/VSLN4781