Last weekend for Rodin exhibit at VMFA

He shaped thousands of works, many iconic for many reasons, by the time he died in 1917 at age 77.

But for the endless creativity and major productivity, he, like Leonardo da Vinci centuries before, left behind an oeuvre that was both deep and diverse but also often associated with a single piece.

In Rodin’s case, it was “The Thinker.”

The bronze sculpture of a man resting his chin on his right hand, his left hand hanging loosely over his knee, has transcended the world of art and come to represent the human condition as much as da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

“‘The Thinker’ is thought itself,” said Mitchell Merling, head of the Department of European Art at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. “There’s a reason Rodin is timeless. In his best works, he gave sculpture human emotion in such a concise way.”

Rodin’s way is going to be on display in Richmond in a way that it has never been on display before in the United States. From Nov. 21 through March 13, the VMFA is hosting “Rodin: Evolution of a Genius.”

The show is part retrospective, part glimpse into the world Rodin created, figuratively and literally, in his Paris studio. The seven galleries, taking the entire special exhibition space on the lowest level of the museum, are designed to evoke a stroll through the master’s studio.

It will include more than 200 works, drawn largely from the Musée Rodin in Paris and never before displayed in the U.S. There will be iconic pieces — “The Thinker,” “The Kiss,” “The Age of Bronze” — but also more obscure works, as well as pieces of pieces, photographs and other items that will tell the story of Rodin’s rise from a student who was denied admission to Paris’ best schools to a living legend powerful enough to dictate the contents of a museum in his honor.

“These are Rodin’s Rodins,” Merling, the curator of the Richmond version of the show, said as he toured the exhibition space while the work was being installed. “These are the ones he gave to the French state. You will feel his presence in this show.”

Much of the work came from Rodin’s own hands, but there also are pieces that were done by his assistants and still others that were cast after his death.

The Richmond exhibition is based on the work of the four people who co-curated the original show for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. That version, called “Metamorpheses: In Rodin’s Studio,” ran from May 31 to Oct. 18. After leaving Richmond, it is scheduled to go to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. From there, the pieces will be shipped back to France, likely not to return to the U.S.

It will be the fifth collaboration between the VMFA and Montreal. The VMFA Picasso show in 2011 also was based on life in the artist’s studio and was the show most similar in scope and presentation to Rodin. The others include exhibitions of the work of Tiffany, Tom Wesselmann and Fabergé.

“It’s a very serious show,” said Merling, who last curated “The Art of the Flower,” which closed June 21 after attracting record crowds to the VMFA during its three-month run. “We’re expecting scholars from all over the world to come for this.”

The reason for that interest, he said, is what’s in the show. It includes an extensive collection of plaster work, the models from which finished works were cast or carved.

It includes little of the type of finished work available in most U.S. museums.

“This is very different from the typical private collection in America,” said Sylvain Cordier, curator of early decorative arts at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and a co-curator of the Rodin exhibition.

He said the show, which drew more than 200,000 people in Montreal, “offers the public the big icons it expects” and uses them to introduce people to a fuller portrait of Rodin.

“We want the public to understand the richness of the process,” he said.

That will be evident from the moment people walk into the exhibit.

The show opens with a hall of hands, sculptures of hands on pedestals on each side of a walkway leading to a large image of “The Gates of Hell.” The gates, a doorway that rises more than 20 feet high, was Rodin’s first major commission and became his life-defining work. The final casting did not occur until after his death, but the images that went into it became some of his most famous work, including a version of “The Thinker.” (The original plaster is too fragile to travel; it is on display at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.)

In the opening hall, Merling said, viewers will be able to see two of the things that helped Rodin break free from the world of classical sculptors in which he lived and establish himself as a modern master: scale and fragmentation.

In an era in which the rules of art were respected, Rodin ignored the boundaries. He would present fragments as finished work, and he toyed with scale in ways not done before.

His studio included hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of sculpture, and Rodin would occasionally combine them in ways not originally intended. In one example, he took a large hand and placed it over a small couple in an embrace, the pieces combined with liquid plaster into a new design that shows the outsized hand seemingly engulfing the people.

Rodin also ignored other academic inclinations in the world of art, especially when it came to working with models.

“He had a fascination with nudes, but he didn’t like to have people striking poses,” Merling said.

So Rodin took another approach: He hired circus performers, gypsies and assorted others to serve as models. They would wander nude by the dozens, mingling in the studio with Rodin’s 40 assistants.

“It was like a factory,” Merling said. “It was kind of like what Andy Warhol had, only Rodin constantly worked. He never forgot where he came from. He considered himself a craftsman.”

His craft spreads across every inch of gallery space.

The most striking piece might be the three-times-life-size plaster model of “The Thinker,” which was used to cast the bronze version Rodin placed at the Pantheon in Paris.

But his process is equally present, and clear, two galleries over, where there are multiple versions of a marble piece created by his assistants.

Rodin did not work in marble himself, preferring to spend his time creating new works while his assistants made the pieces, but he meticulously supervised the work.

“But it’s every bit his work,” Cordier said. “It was his hand guiding them, his vision they carved. Those are his work.”

One of the most precise of his works sits in the final gallery, “The Age of Bronze.”

The life-size work depicting a Belgian soldier is so exact that judges in a Paris competition accused Rodin of having used his subject to create a mold rather than carving a likeness of him.

“They spent four days measuring and examining the model before finally deciding that Rodin had actually done the work,” Merling said.

Throughout, Merling and Cordier said, the big draw is the plaster work.

Most of the Rodin pieces on display in the U.S. are finished marbles and bronzes. This show includes many plaster pieces Rodin created from his clay originals and then used to create his castings or carvings.

The pieces are fragile, so they rarely have been on loan.

“This is a special collection,” Cordier said. “American audiences haven’t seen this.”

“Even if you went to Paris, you wouldn’t see this work displayed like this,” Merling said. “This is really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

For the seriousness of the show, there are some lighter aspects, Merling said.

In the atrium, there will be a selfie stand where people can strike their own Rodinesque poses. There also will be on-site sculptors several days a week, films and talks, including one Merling will give in February about Rodin’s approach to nudes.

“We want people to have some fun, to let down their hair a little,” he said.