“The career curve that is traced [in a new London exhibition] takes Rodin from the youthful emulation of classical figures to a position of extra-ordinary eminence from whose heights he ‘heralded the modern age’… But this avid appetite for contemporary relevance is distracting: the more important point about Rodin is that he was not very modern at all, either in style or subject matter. In fact he was the 19th-century artist writ large, the product of an era when the capture of mainstream art by capital, and by the state, was a recent phenomenon, and when successful artists became not only powerful celebrities but also full participants in the social and economic establishment.”