ABSTRACT
As a visual artist, Auguste Rodin can only be filled with wonder by the dance, ‘a poem withdrawn from any scribe’s tool’, according to the poet Mallarme. Indeed, he added, the Cambodian dancers evolved ‘beyond the beauty’ we can, or he himself was able to, grasp. The series of Cambodian dancers has little in common with the vein of his drawings representing women in sapphic, masturbating, obscene postures. He drafted some sketches for the chapel of Saint Sulpice. The Cambodian apsara were meant to dance on the inner wall. The Cambodian dancers were back home, represented in oblong-shaped frames on coloured paper, bathing like fashionable engravings in an unreal light, now that their models had turned to dust. Dance enables us to transcend the envelopes of flesh to carry them to their highest degree of plenitude. The dance from the fringes of the Colonies attracts the creme de la creme of Paris.
