Exhibition Lecture

In 1912, The Met received a group of tiny plaster limbs by Auguste Rodin as a gift from the artist following the Museum’s purchase of a significant number of works from his studio. The small selection is representative of a larger corpus of body parts—arms, legs, hands, and heads—produced from molds and used by Rodin to create new figures and figural groups through an experimental process of assembly. This lecture examines the origins and development of this technique, as well as how Rodin’s process of combining disparate parts opened onto a genre of remarkable assemblage sculptures that incorporate ancient vessels and other found elements. 

Elyse Nelson is Associate Curator in the department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she is responsible for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sculpture. She has published on a range of sculptors, from Canova to Rodin, and co-curated the 2022 exhibition, Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast. Elyse is currently organizing an exhibition on Rodin’s assemblage sculptures, which will open at the Met in 2028.

This lecture is given in conjunction with ISAW's exhibition Rodin's Egypt. This exhibition and its accompanying catalogue were made possible by generous support from the Leon Levy Foundation.