FRIENDS OF 17ԹWEBINARS
“An elegance of spirit adorns all its works.”: Auguste Rodin and the Art of Ancient Egypt
Friends of 17Թpresent the next webinar of the 2025-2026 season on February 18, 2026, at 7:00 pm EST, presented by Carl Walsh. This webinar will be free and open to the public. Registration through Zoom (with a valid email address) is required. This webinar will be recorded and all registrants will be sent a recording link in the days following the webinar.
Auguste Rodin. Le Succube (The Succubus). Bronze. 1888 (model), 1890 (casting). Musée Rodin: S.520.
Most people would not conceive of any connection between the works of the master French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and the art of ancient Egypt. Rodin is celebrated as one of the founders of modernist sculpture, who crafted sensual and expressive bodies that embraced the subject and materiality of the medium. Ancient Egyptian sculptors, on the other hand, presented highly codified representations of the human form, which have often been viewed as static, rigid, and somewhat devoid of emotion. The two certainly present radically different bodily aesthetics, divorced by vast temporal and cultural contexts. How then, can we see them as meaningfully related?
This is one of the key questions framing the current exhibition Rodin’s Egypt, now on display at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, in collaboration with the Musée Rodin in Paris, until March 15, 2026. The show explores Rodin’s admiration for the art of ancient Egypt and how he engaged and responded to the Egyptian antiquities he amassed over the course of his life. In this talk, Dr. Walsh will discuss how Rodin became interested in ancient Egyptian art in his waning years and the profound—if subtle—impact it had on the sculptor’s practice through the objects which you can see in the exhibition.
Dr. Carl Walsh holds a PhD in Archaeology from University College London and is an assistant exhibition curator at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. He is dedicated to crafting accessible and engaging stories about the ancient world and has curated multiple exhibitions at ISAW covering the ancient societies of Iraq, Etruria, Islamic Spain, and Egypt, as well as early modern art and photography. He has co-edited Teaching Ancient Egypt in Museums: Pedagogies in Practice, which delves into ethical best practices for engaging learners about ancient Egypt using museum objects and is currently working on a follow up volume that looks more broadly about teaching about ancient West Asia, North Africa, and the Mediterranean in museums. Carl’s research focuses on Bronze Age cross-cultural interactions and his current projects focus on the material culture—such as board games, cosmetics, furniture, and pottery—of the kingdom of Kerma (Kush) in modern Sudan, and considers how these objects reveal the complex interactions between societies across North Africa.