“I have never avoided the influence of others. I would have considered this as a cowardice and a lack of sincerity towards myself. I believe that the personality of the artist develops and asserts itself through the struggles it has to go through when pitted against other personalities. If the fight is fatal and the personality succumbs, it means that this was bound to be its fate.”

When Matisse wrote this in 1907, the Oedipal influence he was fighting most ferociously was 19th-century sculptor Auguste Rodin. Matisse’s three-dimensional experiments complemented and illuminated dilemmas in his painting, and for the muscular, craggy worker in his first major sculpture “The Serf” (1900-03), he closely referenced Rodin’s “Walking Man”, even using the same living model. But just six years later, in the taut, spiralling S-figure of the resting dancer about to spring in “The Serpentine”, volumes and spaces folding and unfolding as a “condensation of sensations”, the challenge to the senior artist is marked.

The Musée d’Orsay’s charged, evocative exhibition Oublier Rodin? La Sculpture à Paris 1905-1914 recreates the heady decade when young sculptors questioned, acknowledged, consolidated or rejected Rodin’s haunting presence. Although in Rodin’s impressionistic techniques – furrowed surfaces, swelling curves, vibrant play of light and shadow – lay templates for abstraction, the modernists opposed his language of gesture, pathos and heightened naturalism, seeking instead simplification, clarity, essential structures. The impressionist stronghold of the d’Orsay is a fabulous backdrop for these radical breakthroughs, placing them precisely in the traditional context against which they were created.

Presiding reproachfully over the exhibition, the writhing mass of bodies in “The Gates of Hell”, on which Rodin worked from 1880 to his death in 1917, embodies his pessimism and also points, in the collapse of narrative unity and compositional hierarchy, to modernist fragmentation and the end of centralised perspective. Rodin’s psychological subtlety, sense of inner force and tragic vision, too, all anticipated expressionism – most notably the work of Wilhelm Lehmbruck, a miner’s son from Duisburg who, in earthy, pared-down, elongated forms such as “Large Standing Figure” and “Large Dreamer”, saw the naked body as a metaphor for spiritual suffering. Lehmbruck is presented here as Rodin’s unlikely Gothic heir: his lonely, skeletal, cast-down soldier “The Fallen” (1915-16) is an impassioned echo of Rodin’s “Ugolin”, yet an authentically modern enough statement of existential despair for Joseph Beuys, half a century later, to take Lehmbruck as a benchmark for emotive expressiveness.

As in painting of this decade, sculpture’s battleground was the nude, the head, the portrait. Rodin’s figures here – “Seated Female Torso”, “Funerary Genius”, “The Prayer”, “Meditation Without Arms”, also called, significantly, “Inner Voices” – are voluptuous, histrionic, shielding their faces, coiling or thrusting their bodies in dynamic movement. His French descendants countered with the restraint of classicism. “I search for beauty not character,” wrote Aristide Maillol when making his severe, smooth classical “Bather” series. Of Maillol’s coolly elegant “The Mediterranean”, André Gide wrote: “She is beautiful, she does not signify anything. It is a silent work”. Here the piece stands alongside Emile Antoine Bourdelle’s “Le Fruit”, a classical column contoured into a languid female form, and the “luminous ensemble” of Matisse’s “The Serpentine”, whose rope-like limbs and rhythmic composition herald the ecstatic figures of his “Dance” the following year.

The Rodin-Matisse dialogue – “The Serpentine” in turn influenced Rodin’s late “Dance Movement Pas de Deux B” – is persuasive. Picasso, by contrast, forgot Rodin comprehensively: the jagged, sinewy “Tête de Fernande” of 1909, where he carves his lover’s hair into aggressively twisted bulbous protuberances reminiscent of tribal art and reduces her head to an alternation of convex and concave forms, is a landmark. Picasso later joked that he was a prophet because Fernande had an operation, literally going under the knife, once the work was finished. But he knew too that in its crystalline breaks, multiple facets and acute angles, the work prophesied the cubist, boldly abstracting sculpture that now enriched western modernism as pioneering sculptors from eastern Europe converged on Paris.

Alexander Archipenko from Kiev condensed the intangible – space, transparency, light, reflection – into abbreviated, spare figures: “Woman, or Sadness”, “Seated Woman”. Experimenting with blocks, cylinders, pyramids, Constantin Brancusi from Bucharest manipulated the minimalist, primitive egg form – an elongated ovoid – into heads such as “Sleeping Muse”, birds, fish, all with immaculate polished surfaces that “should look as through they were ascending out of the mass into perfect and complete being”.

Chaim Lipchitz from Vilnius flattened the figure into archaic grandeur in “Pregnant Woman”, Ossip Zadkine from Vitebsk in “Woman with Mandolin” compressed it into audacious block-like forms. All shared an energy and idealism that remain exhilarating; my only criticism of this insightful show is that there are too few works from each and, inexplicably, none at all by their close friend and fellow pioneer Amedeo Modigliani, a sculptor of genius before ill-health forced him to abandon the medium.

Lipchitz’s story, though, is continued in a delightful scholarly exhibition of his graphic work, just opened at London’s Ben Uri Gallery. These drawings are more constructed than those of the cubist painters and extend into space, with colour indicating the positions of the planes. In his early period, they show how he synthesised different viewpoints, combining figures into new forms – an embracing couple with a child contorted into a single larger figure, for example. But “even at my most abstract phase, I was always making drawings after nature”, Lipchitz said. He changed his name from Chaim to Jacques as he became a French formalist but, as with Chagall, the Nazi threat in the 1930s urged him back to Judaism and towards narrative: what he called “works with an integrated message”.

With these especially, he depended on drawings to work through complex ideas and distil memories. A “Mother and Child” drawing, balancing hope and precariousness, is based on a memory of a crippled woman in Russia. Of “Prometheus Strangling the Vulture”, made for Paris’s 1937 Exposition International, Lipchitz wrote: “It was conceived as a struggle, not a simple conquest, in which light, education, science were struggling against darkness and ignorance, which had not yet been conquered. I remember that I was drawing night and day at that time, trying to work out all the implications of the theme”.

Those dense ink drawings are a highlight here: as his geometric shapes soften, lines become more fluid and free, washes and shading more varied, we see the cubist master turn storyteller – a storytelling that was not, of course, a return to the Sturm und Drang of Rodin but was underpinned by a lifetime of formal experimentation.

‘Oublier Rodin? La sculpture à Paris 1905-1914’, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, to May 31 www.musee-orsay.fr, then Fundación Mapfre, Madrid, June 23-October 4 www.fundacionmapfre.com

‘Jacques Lipchitz, Master Drawings: The Anatomy of a Sculptor’, Ben Uri Gallery, London NW8, to July 26, www.benuri.org.uk