On the evening of May 29, 1912 Rodin was in the audience for a performance of Claude Debussy’s Afternoon of a Faun, staged by Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. Vaslev Nijinksy, Tartar prince of dance, performed the title role. Enthusiastic about the choreography in general and Nijinsky’s sexual dancing in particular, Rodin next day defended the performance in a letter to the conservative newspaper Le Figaro, whose editor-owner, Gaston Calmette, had savaged the ballet in his morning edition. After printing statements by Diaghilev, Odilon Redon, and Rodin, Calmette turned his remarks to the sculptor, whose letter he found even more lewd and indecent than Nijinsky’s dancing. During the next weeks, Rodin continued to be more vehemently attacked than the ballet.

Remarkably, Rodin put the distasteful events that followed the performance aside when he made his image of the dancer.

Throughout his career the sculptor worked from models or from assembling already realized motifs. For Nijinsky, by contrast, he worked from memory. He constructed the figure by pinching rolls of clay, contracting and distorting the form to capture the dancer’s explosive movement.

Despite its economy of means - or perhaps because of them - Nijinsky is dynamic and astonishingly modern. It is Rodin’s final testimony to his fascination with dancers and movement, which had been a major theme of his work for decades. Evidence of his devotion to dance is his friendships with Isadora Duncan, Loie Fuller, and the Japanese Noh actress Haneko. A more significant record is the continuing presence in his studio of dancers and models. He recorded their arabesques, leaps, and poses in hundreds of drawings, an ongoing project that led to the Dance Movements, a series of small sculptures from 1910-12, roughly but surely made, culminating in Nijinsky.