Exploring the full range of the work of French artist Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), this book also reveals the deep significance of Rodin's oeuvre to the history of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, which holds one of the finest collections of Rodin sculpture in the United States. The publication contains examples from his early days as a struggling artist to his mature and most successful works. The majority of the bronzes are lifetime casts by the sculptor, making this collection a rare and significant body of Rodin's output. A related group of plaster models and fragments augment these major pieces, adding to the scope and breadth of this volume. Showcasing beautiful new photography of more than fifty of Rodin's most iconic artworks alongside an illuminating essay, this book will delight and surprise readers with its novel insights into one of the greatest sculptors in art history. Exhibition: Legion of Honor, San Francisco, USA (28.01. - 10.12.2017).

"The Rodin collection left by Mrs. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels to the California Palace of the Legion of Honor is the most salient and nearly the earliest example of America's admirable passion for an artist whose personality and works dominated the decades of 1880 to 1910. In an essay which follows this introduction, Patricia B. Sanders has chronicled the history of Mrs. Spreckels' collecting enterprise... Her choice was remarkable. Before Rodin's death in 1917 and over the following years until the 1940s, she acquired, first from Rodin and later from those nearest him, bronzes, plasters and marbles -- among them not only many of the most important Rodins but also many of the best... The Spreckels collection... is second only to the Musée Rodin in Paris as a center of Rodin art and sculptures"--

Winner of the 2016 Marfield Prize In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke—then a struggling poet in Germany—went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet.