ABSTRACT
Room 14 in the Rodin Museum in Paris is devoted to sculptures designed for various public monuments. Behind a large study for a monument to Balzac are two small pieces, both identified as studies for a statue planned for London in honour of the artist Whistler: a marble head of 1905, and a small bronze figure on a pedestal, Muse pour le Monument Whistler. Anne Friedberg suggests that as the department store supplanted the arcade, space opened for a female flaneur -a flaneuse since shopping provided the possibility for women to wander the city alone. Her marginality to the stories of Rodin and Rilke is not particularly surprising given her notorious reclusiveness and her actual invisibility as an artist in the 1900s. In Donald Prater's biography of Rilke, for example, she is mentioned only once, as one of the younger artists Rilke met during his years with Rodin.
