Rodin was as modern as Magritte and Dali, but more touching and troubling than either

Rodin’s studio at Meudon in the suburbs of Paris is huge and filled with light — a sort of combined warehouse, factory and conservatory. It’s crammed with white plaster figures: battered, writhing and fragmentary. This strange, almost surreal effect has been recreated in The Making of Rodin at Tate Modern.

The result is more interesting than beautiful. Few exhibits would normally be classified as finished pieces. Most are plaster casts of clay studies, ranging in scale from miniature to gigantic. Quite a lot aren’t even works in progress, more ingredients for art, bits and pieces he could play around with.

Rodin called these ‘giblets’ (‘abats’). Their effect can be macabre: a severed hand, for example, dangling from a piece of string, like something in a butcher’s window. A whole tray of tiny plaster hands, conversely, seems more like those cabinets of reliquaries filled with holy body parts you see in Mediterranean churches. A study for Balzac’s dressing gown looks very much like an actual, late 19th-century garment soaked in plaster.

To the sculptor all these were morsels to be fitted together into new wholes, which Rodin did in increasingly wild and imaginative ways as he grew older. ‘The Mask of Camille Claudel and Left Hand of Pierre de Wissant’ (after 1900) combines a beautifully modelled head of his pupil and lover with, attached to one side, a gigantic masculine palm and fingers detached from one of the figures in his ‘Burghers of Calais’.

This juxtaposition brings Magritte and Dali to mind, while being more touching and troubling than either. The male limb caressing, but also huge and powerful; the female head passive and still. The show brings out how for Rodin, a finished work became less and less the point. Clearly it was the endless recycling and repurposing of his ideas that fascinated him, putting them in new relationships with one another.

In his workshop the production process was quasi-industrial (after all, he was a contemporary of Henry Ford as well as of Claude Monet).