EVERY GREAT THINKER is a mystery and a puzzle to his contemporaries. Auguste Rodin was not only the greatest sculptor since Michelangelo, but he was the greatest thinker in stone of modern times, perhaps ever since the prehistoric age when men first began to think it possible to shape in stone the presentments of living things. Who will venture to contemplate his wonderful collection of groups, figures and busts, and not require some guidance in the master's meaning? There is the great art and the technique, than which none are more remarkable, and behind these there is the soul in his work. How are we to read that soul?

Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) is the only sculptor who is of equal rank to the French painters of the "Great Generation" from Monet to Cezanne. But while he has been considered an early modernist among sculptors, he drew on a rich variety of artistic traditions, including those of ancient Greece, the Renaissance, Egypt and the Far East. He was the creator of a new form in sculpture, the fragment as a finished work, usually a head or a trunk, sometimes a pair of heads only. Rodin is renowned for his expression of emotion and movement and his use of symbolism and distortion. In 1913 the artist described his pictorial approach to sculpting saying: "I place the model in such a way it stands out against the background and so that the light falls on this profile. Then I turn them again and gradually work my way round the figure". Gathered in this work is a collection of photographs of Rodin's masterpieces - from the impressive shape of "The Thinker", to the powerfully melancholy group of "The Burghers of Calais" and some of the most outstanding portrait busts of this century, among them Rose Beuret, Madame de Goloubeff, Victor Hugo and Gustav Mahler.