Two Rodin’s pupils. Malvina Hoffman and Kathleen Bruce between dance, photography and sculpture.

Abstract

In the last years of his career, Auguste Rodin has been the center of a network of relationships between visual artists and dancers. Some pupils and collaborators of the great sculptor saw the dance through his eyes, and it becomes the main subject of their works of art, or an important aspect of their biographies. The essay examines the experience of two women, both Rodin’s pupils, using sculpture, photography and the autobiographies as sources of the culture of the dance: Malvina Hoffman, the Anna Pavlova’s sculptor, and the close friend of Isadora Duncan Kathleen Bruce.