François Auguste René Rodin frequently reminded his adoring and often wealthy admirers that he was first a craftsman and then, only later, became an artist. He began as an accomplished modeller and established portrait sculptor eventually serving as a valued designer for two years at the Sèvres porcelain factory while also working as a sculptor. His earlier works were not well received by critics, but St John the Baptist Preaching (1878) for all its radicalism and challenge was awarded third prize in the Paris Salon. Around the early 1880s he was able to commit himself to sculptural practice thanks to the commission for what was to become known as the Gates of Hell. It is in the period subsequent to the rise in his reputation when he had access and funds to build a collection of archaeological remains from Greek, Roman, and Egyptian sculpture that Rodin’s Egypt concerns itself with. At his death this collection, amounted to over 6,000 items, often referred to as ‘fragments’, and is now seen to be crucial to the particular aesthetic and innovative challenge to modernism that his drawing and sculpture made.

In 2022/3 and 2025/26 there were exhibitions in Paris and New York, respectively, curated by Bénédicte Garnier, dedicated to Rodin’s Egyptian collection, and the book, Rodin’s Egypt was published to coincide with the New York iteration. It celebrates the amazing research project that underpins the exhibition and tries to put some flesh on the bones of the relationship that Rodin had with the art of the past – especially the objects that were beginning to emerge from contemporary excavations. The first part of the book tracks the routes of acquisition and highlights some of the ways that Rodin thought about the objects that were offered to him by tracking his particular selection processes. For example, his choices (and rejections) reveal how the fragmentary appearance of the object was at times much more important to him than its archaeological relevance. This approach to the archaeological remains is consistent with the finding that while he had more that 1,000 items of ancient Egyptian art in his collection there were only five books on Egyptology in his library. This suggests that he did not share the archaeologists’ concern with the past culture that produced the objects but in its immediate fragmentary appearance as a complete thing decoupled from the past. He embraced this radical approach to these remains in order to break the viewer’s habitual engagement with late 19th century conventions of sculpture. The casting, recasting, and inclusion of these forms in his sculpture confirms them as a locus of formal deliberation rather than the stylistic opportunism we saw much later with the enthusiasm for African sculpture (in Picasso for example). The primary claim that Rodin’s Egypt builds on is that his dramatic truncations and amputations of the figure threw down a gauntlet that Modernism was (eventually) happy to pick up. To make this explicit, the high-quality photographs in Rodin’s Egypt juxtapose examples from the better part of 10,000 drawings and sculptures by Rodin with images of artifacts that were in his collection. The outcome is a convincing (if somewhat inevitably teleological) pictorial essay that presents a correlation between certain features both the works and the remains have in common. Reflections on the meaning of these correspondences is largely the concern of the second half of the book. The insights and connections in all these essays are well presented, thoughtful, and provocative.

There already exists a substantial body of work on Rodin and his archaeological collection that largely draws in discussions of many sculptors’ purposeful engagement with the fragment and the unfinished work over the last 500 years. Rodin’s efforts to give the appearance of the unfinished work as complete (non-finito) were initially rejected by the public, but with the endorsement of the salon and the widespread fascination with archaeological remains – especially the late 19th C craze for Egyptology – he became the doyen of cultivated taste. As a consequence, he was able to fund his collection and develop plans for a museum that he subsequently donated to the French state. A great virtue of Rodin’s Egypt is the inclusion of footnotes in the essays and an equally valuable bibliography directing the reader to further material that thickens this sketch. There are also many reliable resources online that can help give context and further depth to the fascinating sculptural practice of non-finito and how this heralds a foundational modernist medium of collage. Rodin’s place in that is further secured by Garnier’s research and her thoughtful editorial approach to the book.

Rodin’s Egypt is obviously a book designed as a high-quality adjunct to what was clearly a spectacular and important exhibition. It has a material presence in its substantial binding, and the text is set in Nantes book with the titles in Injurial. These typefaces give it both a certain quirkiness and, for the most part, add to a sense of monumentality at the same time. The typographical choice is clearly intended deliver an objectness to the book which, judging by the installation pictures, must have reflected the materiality of the exhibition. At times however the weight of the title’s font is insufficient for the colour contrast and where it is used for the subheadings and in the footnotes at a smaller point size the text is barely legible. In addition, the fashionable low contrast – green on green, light green on light grey, etc. – that possibly works well on backlit screens, becomes intrusive in print and renders sections of it non-finito. This is a great pity because this stylistic vogue works against the various author’s academic heavy lifting and renders some aspects of this well thought out and prestigious compliment to an important exhibition as at best a trophy or possibly a frivolous decoration. In one sense this may be argued as a characteristic of Rodin’s double life as a pioneer of the modernist avant garde and a society portraitist beloved of the Paris glitterati. If this was intended, I tip my cap.

Despite these reservations Rodin’s Egypt is a testament to the quality of Bénédicte Garnier’s intellectual efforts over the years to reconcile Rodin and the availability of archaeological remains available to him in a way that touches the present in its focus on the creative engagement with the concept of the fragment. The quality of the photographs, printed as they are with careful colour grading across the volume, reminds us of just how aesthetically compromised the digital screen versions of these images are. For example, the amazing photograph of an initial study of Balsac (1897) is enlivened as it should be by the tactility, smell, and plasticity of the paper, while the small photograph of the jewellike study of the head of Évêque (1895) – a plaster that exemplifies the fusion of the non-finito and Rodin’s obsession with the fragment - is too far off the search engine’s beaten track to appear on the web at all.

This study is an example that not only connects Rodin with his post-impressionist contemporaries including Medaro Rosso but also evokes much later non-figurative artists as diverse as Joseph Cornell, Eduardo Paolozzi, and David Smith. This is the virtue of a substantial adjunct to an exhibition that may seem something of a luxury, but in this case, the academic insights, the references and the quality of the image essays have a slow burn that begins to reveal the resonances of Rodin’s fascination with the fragment and non-finito and his relevance to current art practice.