Rodin’s Egypt

The collecting of Egyptian antiquities in the nineteenth century was fueled by an increased availability, as imperial expeditions and colonial networks enabled the circulation of artifacts through diplomatic, scholarly, and commercial channels. This “exotic” material quickly became accessible to the Parisian art world, where figures such as Jean-Léon Gérôme, Edmond de Goncourt, and Gustave Moreau, alongside Rodin, acquired Egyptian works from Egyptologists, dealers, and patrons. The resulting admixture of aesthetic influences, deeply marked by processes of colonial extraction, continues to shape the meaning of these objects today. Scholars and curators at the Musée Rodin and NYU’s ISAW emphasize that these pieces serve as traces of ongoing artistic dialogue as well as enduring colonial histories, foregrounding the layered legacies embedded in both their display and reinterpretation.

Since Napoleon’s 1798 invasion of Egypt and Syria, the French have been fascinated by Egypt—a fascination that entwined scientific inquiry, colonial ambition, and cultural fantasy. Napoleon’s campaign introduced Egyptology to France and triggered “Egyptomania,” as scholars and artists became captivated by ancient monuments, artifacts, and imagery. This enduring interest helped fuel the flow of Egyptian antiquities into Paris and conditioned how figures like Rodin encountered, collected, and reinterpreted Egyptian art in their work.

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From the exhibition “Rodin’s Egypt” I infer that Rodin’s modernism emerges in the gap—“negative space”—between non-Western sculptural logic and disruptions inside Western academic tradition. Like the African for Picasso—the Egyptian for Rodin becomes both resource and challenge. But there is a difference, Rodin’s “Egypt” is not simply the “primitive other” it is  a highly sophisticated other whose material artifacts serve as interlocutors exposing modernism’s workings: for Rodin  fragments are thesis and antithesis, standardization and repetition are events, and the body is a field of possibility. So while neoclassicism sought the ideal, and modernism pursued expression through the willful distortion of mimetic codes, Rodin found in Egyptian art a catalyst for provocation—by aligning the archaic with the avant-garde. Egyptian objects, for Rodin, became sites where ancient formal rigor could be used to unsettle academic conventions and energize modern sculpture, opening a space for new configurations of bodily presence and meaning. 

What is apparent in “Rodin’s Egypt” is a dynamic of return and reinterpretation, in which collecting and studio practice become acts of ongoing recycling and synthesis. In this context, Egyptian antiquities function less as fixed historical or stylistic references than as resources, illuminating how modernism is shaped by both the rejection and embrace of past traditions. Like Edouard Manet—who subverted the grand tradition by using minor artists as his models and rejecting conventional hierarchies—Rodin refuses to allow the past to dictate the present. Instead, he actively renegotiates inherited forms, transforming historical references into productive sources for new aesthetic innovation.​

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Such a reading unsettles traditional narratives, repositioning modern artistic practice as a dynamic process that mediates between past and present. From this perspective, modernism—contrary to conventional accounts—should not be represented as a single, reductive linear narrative, but as a dialectical process. Practices like Rodin’s, in which the past is continually recast, not negated, provide evidence for an alternative model: here, modernism is defined by recuperation and reclamation, rendered recursive and generative, with history and tradition serving as ongoing resources for innovation rather than simply marking a succession of negations, ruptures or breaks.