Rodin Lekturen : Deutungen und Debatten von der Moderne zur Postmoderne With the works of Auguste Rodin modernity finally reached the art of sculpture. One might think for example of the French sculptors innovative depiction of the human body as a living organism (The Age of Bronze) and of the playful proliferation of iconographic and literary references (The Gates of Hell). But how one could ask did this art historical knowledge come into being How did the work of the French sculptor become an iconic incarnation of modernity itselfWhile art historical research and exhibitions usually tend to use the notion of >>modernity<< as a conceptual framework which helps to describe the newness of Rodins works this study in contrast turns to the historical emergence of this modernist discourse in some of its key moments. Its main focus is on the highly divergent approaches to the sculptor and his work as they appeared for example in the art criticism of the naturalist and symbolist schools but also in vitalist philosophy in sociology in cultural criticism in the rather conservative art historical research of postwar Germany in the American debate on modernism and in postmodernist interpretations. In the debates about Rodin every new reading of his works and of the artistic persona seems to take up earlier interpretations and reinterprets them. The reader of this study is therefore invited to take part in the encounter of a dense network of ideas and concepts about modernity in search of itself.The second chapter entitled Einfühlung und Diagnose is devoted to Rodins famous sculpture The Age of Bronze (1877) and to the notorious scandal that this work evoked at its first presentations in the Salons of Belgium and France. Rodins naturalistic exaggeration of the traditional modes of representation of the human body has traditionally been interpreted by art historians as a proof of his outstanding craftsmanship. As can be read in many studies the artist had with this work achieved a new degree of sculptural immediacy in the empirical description of the human body. In contrast to that the focus of this chapter will be more on the ways how contemporary art critics in their early comments on this work and later art historians have exerted the ambivalence of their own receptive attitude towards the work  and how this ambivalence has become an important catalyst for the discussions about Rodins modernity. As shall be demonstrated these early critics verbalized an indecisive oscillation between an enthusiasm for th ...