BOOKS: August Rodin: Erotic Drawings,

August Rodin made sketches throughout his life but in his last two decades turned to erotic studies of the female nude. Encouraging his models to move, relax and forget him, he sketched rapidly, without looking at the paper, dropping the finished work on the floor.

Often he cut up images and superimposed them, as in this one, "Female Couple". Paul Klee called them "nude caricatures ... amazingly brilliant. Outlines drawn with a couple of pencil lines, flesh colour set down in watercolour with a full brush ... the effect is simply monumental." August Rodin: Erotic Drawings, with 107 colour illustrations, is published by Thames and Hudson (pounds 48).