instantaneous response to sight or shape-or to im­pulse. This over and beyond his sheet masculine drive, was the clue to much of his art. Rodin sought to communicate the sense of excitement of the moving human body simply in its flexions and quick changes. To achieve spontaneity, he worked at phenomenal speed, modelling with clay^- or drawing in pencil in a copybook in rapid response to his mod­el's changing movements, discarding and trying again. In the cellar of the Rodin Museum in Meudon, outside Paris, there are cabinets filled with hundreds of his brief experiments with heads, torsos, legs, arms and hands. He sometimes worked on half a dozen or more heads or hands in a day, molding the clay with his fingers or a penknife only to dismiss all the results.

In such urgency and hunger for creation, his natural medium was the malleable clay. He made innumerable Small clay models -maquettes - until he had a design to his liking. Then he had an assistant build -from wood, wire, pipes and nails-an armature, or Skeleton, approx­imately one third to one half the size of the figure he planned ultimately to produce. Using a plaster cast of his original maquette as a guide, Rodin next built up a clay replica on the armature, heaping it with the blobs and pellets that where a hallmark of his work, altering the design as it took shape under his hands. When satisfied with this larger model, which was kept moist with wet cloths so that he could continually re­work the clay, he set his assistants to building a full-scale armature. Then Rodin began the process again the laving an of the clay, giving a bold jab here to bring out a grimace of the flex of a biceps, using the slightest touch of a finger there to form a quiver of movement or play of light.

Next, a plaster cast was made of the completed figure, perhaps to serve as the base for a Bronze cast. Or, an occasion, the clay figure was fired in a kiln to produce a terracotta version. If one of his works was to be reproduced in marble Rodin seldom bothered with the task; this process he left almost entirely to studio technicians. Using a plaster cast of the work as a model, they would bore holes to predetermined depths into a stone block and then cut away until they had duplicated the original cast. It is only rarely that Rodin applied a correcting chis­el; he found working with stone dull, and much preferred the challenge of clay. Molding it, pummelling it, he demonstrated his belief that bro­ken surfaces where the essence of sculpture. The bolder elements of a work, he believed, should stand forth to catch the light; weaker el­ements should be hollowed to hold the shade; highlights and hollows should complement one another to express meaning. "To model shad­ow is to bring out the thought," he once remarked. Without his guiding hand, marble reproductions of his work often came out smoother and more polished than the Originals.

Rodin's preference for working in a soft material was by no means un­usual. The method was well within the tradition of Western sculpture, and few artists since Michelangelo had tried to emulate the Florentine master's method of wrestling with stone, "liberating the figure from the marble that imprisons it," as he himself put it. Nor was Rodin unique in his dramatic expression; in this he had learned much from the sculpture of the baroque era. What was extraordinary about him was his virtuosity with his Chosen medium, the pungency of his attack, his ability to give tangible form to emotion. No matter if a raised hand or moving leg or turned neck did not conform to correct, academic pro­portion: did the sculpture speak?

Rodin was not only one of the most expressive of sculptors, but one of the most prolific. He turned out thousands of busts, single figures, groups and fragments. The very profusion of his work has driven him a kind of injustice: because history knows him as a sculptor, many of his other talents have been overlooked. He was a tireless draftsman and wa­tercolorist; some 7,000 of his drawings, preserved in the recesses of the Rodin Museum in Paris, have never even been exhibited. He was also, especially in his thirties, a painter in oils. Moreover, before he began to earn a steady living from sculpture, he was one of the most skilled professional designers and decorators in France, turning out ev­erything from carved bedsteads for the boudoirs of fashionable cour­tesans to portico caryatids to designs for Sèvres porcelain. An interest in the medieval led him to become an architectural historian, author of The Cathedrals of France, which he illustrated with structural drawings. He was a leading collector of classical art, a private and public orator an aesthetics, a serious student of letters-all these and amorist too.

He began his years as a decorator's apprentice in a run-down working-class quarter of Paris and rounded them out as one of the most prestigious and sought-after personalities in Europe. The road between was long and hard. Until he was in his forties sculpting for his oven sat­isfaction was a luxury; economy need forced him to spend most of his time in everyday work for pay, first as an artisan, then as a decorator with orders of his own. With the 1880s he began to receive some recognition-a Salon prize here, an interested buyer there for the sculptures closest to his heart. But it was only in 1889, with his show with Monet and his Sensation Boon thereafter at the centennial Expo­sition, that Rodin was established as a major influence radiating from the art capital of the world.