Torse de jeune femme cambrée is one of Auguste Rodin’s most sensual and elegant explorations of the female form. Modelled in 1909, this rendering of the female figure was most likely inspired by the reclining figure in Rodin’s Damnée foudroyée (Thunderstruck Damned Woman) (fig. 1), which in turn was intended for the monumental project of The Gates of Hell. The present work is a larger version of the female figure and a further elaboration of its themes, with a highly arched back and protruding chest, accentuating the female characteristics of the form and enhancing its sensuality. The work was exhibited in 1911 at the Paris Salon alongside its companion La Prière (fig. 2). Discussing these two torsos with his friend and art critic Paul Gsell following the exhibition, Rodin noted: ‘There is nothing in nature that has more character than the human body. It evokes through its strength or its grace the most varied images. The human body curved back is like a spring, like a beautiful bow from which Eros aims his invisible arrows’ (quoted in A. Elsen, Rodin’s Art, New York, 2003, p. 561).

As the critic Henri Bidou wrote in his review of the Salon: ‘Look at this thorax which rises while lifting the breasts, these ribs which project and swerve. This chest swells with air, as in the last moment of inhaling. The diaphragm lifted, the two flanks become hollow. This abdomen, caught in the movement of the thorax, is itself full and round. All that remains is a living, swelling body, that carries to pure air the rhythm of its life: an admirable piece of analysis. The refinement of the most complex fitting together of planes is combined with the exactitude of a captured momentary movement’ (ibid., p. 561).

Rodin had always been fascinated with Classical Antiquity and the treatment of the human form by his forebears (fig. 4). As he once exclaimed: ‘I love the sculptures of ancient Greece. They have been and remain my masters’. Rodin had studied the sculptures of the Parthenon frieze from books, plaster casts and some originals in the Louvre in Paris. He was certainly not alone in his appreciation for the ancient sculptures; in the late nineteenth century the Parthenon sculptures were at the height of their popularity. However, it was his first in-person visit to the British Museum in 1881, experiencing the sculptures first hand, that had a profound effect on his work. He returned to these sculptures again and again and began sculpting models without heads and limbs, inspired by the majesty of the archeological ruins of the past. In this process, he created a new genre of art - the headless, armless torso (fig. 3).

Rodin’s appreciation and knowledge of the Classical world is not only seen and felt in his choice of subject matter, but similarly in the treatment of the figure’s flesh. In Torse de jeune femme cambrée, the soft and naturalistic rendering of the stomach and breasts showcases Rodin’s skillful and inimitable working of the human form cast in bronze. The animated play of light on the surface and the sweeping upward movement of the figure creates a sense of it breaking free, as if the figure were about to take flight. Equally taken aback by this dynamic and powerful movement created purely through the torso, Jacques Lipchitz commented after visiting the Musée Rodin in 1919: ‘My joy was immense, and so was my enthusiasm. These figures without arms, heads and legs were endowed with a sense of mystery, and one needed imagination to complete the figure. I clearly saw that what Rodin was doing instinctively was not so different than what we, the cubists, were doing in a more intellectual way, and that at certain points it was even more complex’ (quoted in ibid., p. 563).