As we advance to the cutouts, we witness the complete submergence of eroticism in favor of a purely artistic focus. The papiers découpés must naturally fall last on our timeline, since Rodin went back to all of his watercolors after they were completed, obviously, to cut them up. (As a side note, art historian Robert Descharnes has conducted extensive research on Rodin’s cutouts and has tentatively dated them to between 1908 and 1915 – affirming that Rodin executed most of his cutouts during the waning years of his life, after the drawings and watercolors [Varnedoe 93].) Two Women Embracing portrays two women, as usual, one apparently sitting on the lap of the other. What is interesting about this cutout is that, if we look closely, we will see that the woman in the foreground was actually drawn lying on her side with her head propped in her hand, and is only vertical now because she has been cut out of her original paper and placed this way. This shows how Rodin became, in time, more interested in the possibilities of line and shape than in the lesbian erotic. He would have cut up his drawings and rearranged them only if he was particularly curious in the potential for fresh composition – otherwise he might as well have left this woman lounging on her side. Both women have been heightened with an almost indistinguishable wash of yellow, and it is only because of the physical layering of their forms that we can easily differentiate between their bodies. The combination of their figures seem to form an elongated, upside-down triangle, bent slightly to the right at the tip, the contour lines so faint within this shape as to offer almost no distraction at all. Rather than defining the bodies of the women, the contour line is offered as a simple suggestion of form. Looking at this cutout, our thoughts turn first not to any erotic element, but towards the dynamic composition of the volumes and spaces – the triangular negative spaces between the women’s arms and torsos, the curving volumes of their shoulders, spines, and hips. These aspects of composition were Rodin’s focus, as he declares himself: “I try to see the figure as a mass, as volume. It is this voluminousness that I try to understand” (Rodin qtd. Bonnet 24). Thus, as we can see, it is not the erotic that is emphasized here – indeed, sensuality is almost completely absent – but rather the interaction between the lines and the volumes, because by this time Rodin’s fixation was clearly on the shape relationships and not the sexual ones.
This movement away from eroticism and towards pure shape reaches its ultimate expression in Female Nude Leaning Back on the Shoulders of a Kneeling Woman, in which we see what the title suggests: one woman kneeling, facing another in front of her, who is arching herself backwards so that her head comes to rest on the head of the kneeler. 
It is obvious that these figures were first drawn, then reworked with watercolor, and ultimately cut out from their original page – the faint contour outlines hover just inside the edges of the pale brown watercolor wash, which then sit opaquely over the cream color of the new base paper. The contours are kept to an absolute minimum in this cutout, as is made clear by the absence of defined breasts in either figure, the absence of delineated limbs, heads, or facial features, and only the barest suggestion of genitals. The two figures, connected at the head, are once again washed with an identical color, with a slight darkening where one would expect the hair of the arching woman to be. Indeed, the figures are so amorphous, the scarcity of line allowing them to flow together so effortlessly in form and color, that they seem to form an archway, of sorts, with their bodies – if we blur our eyes again, we can see a lumpy but definitive arch through which we might conceivably walk. All erotic suggestion in this sketch is lost; it requires a good deal of imagination to even make out the figures of the women, much less identify any sort of sexual element in their pose. In the words of Bonnet, Rodin’s attention was caught “by lines, contours, and one detail or another – shoulders, breasts, or hips – not by the woman or the model as an entire person, but by her appearance in terms of a few particularly beautiful lines” (Bonnet 16). This offers a suggestion as to why Rodin might allowed his eroticism to fade out of his drawings: by the cutout stage, he was no longer bound to sexuality in these figures; he was interested only in the line, the shape, concerned himself only with the puzzle-like task of fitting the shapes together to construct a beautiful and balanced composition. Thus, it becomes obvious how, over the course of the years he devoted himself to the portrayal of lesbian couples, Rodin gradually moved from depicting highly erotic, almost pornographic sketches to asexual cutouts concerned primarily with the use of contour line to form shapes and the arrangement of these shapes in relation to one another – contrary to the historic claim that Rodin’s focus and essential intent in his drawings was sexual.