Book excerpt: The sculpture of Auguste Rodin has become such an important part of our visual culture that it seems to have been with us always. The universal appeal of Rodin's work springs from its emotional expressiveness, its astonishingly lifelike vitality, and its passionate mirroring of the human condition. With his impressionistic technique, supported by a complete mastery of anatomical structure, Rodin overthrew the reigning academic precepts of finish and symmetry. By developing subjects beyond traditional allegories, he pointed the way to sheer abstraction in the twentieth century. This handsomely illustrated catalogue publishes for the first time in its entirety a major American collection of sculpture, the Cantor gifts to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and provides a rich context for Rodin's own work. It presents sculpture by Rodin's most important nineteenth-century forerunners--Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse, François Rude, and others--as well as work by the contemporaries he admired, those with whom he competed, those he influenced, and those who moved from his orbit to develop their own styles at the dawn of the twentieth century. But the centerpiece of the book remains Rodin: forty-two works by the most influential sculptor of the modern period, all specially photographed and many shown in multiple views. -- Publisher description.