During his lifetime, Rodin was discreet with his erotic drawings. He made a point of keeping them out of circulation, especially the most provocative lesbian couples. However, after he died and the drawings began to change hands more easily, the market was veritably flooded with forgeries. Indeed, according to Claude Judrin, “more than three quarters of the drawings which circulate on the market are fakes” (Judrin, “Fakes” 76). Lamentably, some even exist in museum collections today. Many of the forgers are still unknown, but a critical few have been named. The studies on their imitations continue: in what ways did these impostors fall short in their attempts to become Rodin? And, more importantly, what was it about his work which compelled them to such fraudulent extremes?
Among the few to be found out is Ernst Durig, a Swiss guard and sculptor who claimed to be Rodin’s last student. He moved from Europe to the United States in 1928, and likely completed the majority of his most harmful forgeries during the decade between 1930 and 1940. Many American museums still house his works (Judrin, “Fakes” 76). But what set Durig apart from the myriad other forgers of Rodin’s drawings was his pursuit of variety - unlike many, who fell into patterns of copying one pose or working in one particular faulty style, Durig insisted on imitating all subjects of Rodin’s drawings, including the Sapphic couples and Cambodian dancers. He worked on many types of paper, in many different mediums. He even went so far as to draw in the margins of Rodin’s authentic letters (Judrin, “Fakes” 76).
But in spite of Durig’s most ardent attempts to replicate the diverse scope Rodin’s work, according to J. Kirk T. Varnedoe, one of the chief factors distinguishing the authentic drawings from the forgeries lies in Rodin’s variegated style:
Rodin’s later drawings have a basis, even if at second hand, in life study, and hence reveal a diversity one would expect from fifteen or more years of changing models and pose experiments; the forgers, on the other hand, tend to be highly consistent, returning again and again to the same format and a characteristic set of conventions and faults (Varnedoe, “True and False” 159).
Although Durig tried to avoid this consistency, he was not skilled enough, or perhaps simply not imaginative enough, to achieve Rodin’s degree of artistic genius, as we can see in an examination of his imitation of Rodin’s Two Figures (left, below). The original (right) depicts two women, again, in an intimate embrace. His overlay of the watercolor (more difficult to discern, regrettably, because of our lack of color in this reproduction) effectively erases the space between the women’s bodies, encircling them in a cocoon of color. The lines defining their arms intertwine until we can hardly tell whose arms are whose. Their heads are aligned so that their hair and their faces become one, 
one body of hair, one face. Both artistically and compositionally, Rodin merges the lesbian couple into a single being in yet another example of his imaginative genius.
Durig’s version of Two Figures (left), while a respectable attempt, falls short of Rodin’s in crucial ways. While his lines are slim and loose, they follow the forms of the bodies too precisely - Rodin’s figures are not so literally muscled. These figures are clumsily overlapped and awkwardly composed, lacking the easy fluidity with which Rodin’s women flow into each other’s bodies. The mention of Rodin’s women raises another point: in Durig’s version, the couple appears to be heterosexual, composed of a man and a woman. Varnedoe confirms what we have already established, that this is “a combination not yet seen in an authentic late drawing; the embraces in Rodin’s late production are … uniquely lesbian” (Varnedoe, “True and False” 177). Thus it becomes evident how, in spite of valiant attempts, Durig (as well as the numerous other forgers busy during the decades following Rodin’s death) was unable to capture the nebulous intimacy so characteristic of Rodin’s lesbian erotic drawings.
top: Auguste Rodin. Photograph. “Auguste Rodin.” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia. Janurary 2006. http://encarta.msn.com