Described as the first of its kind in the United States in 25 years, an exhibition documenting the works of sculptors in Paris from 1832 to the early 20th century has opened in New Brunswick.

“Breaking the Mold: Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin” is being presented through March 12 at the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, 71 Hamilton St. On display are nearly 350 three-dimensional works by more than 60 artists.

“This large-scale exhibition should delight and surprise visitors to the Zimmerli with a broad sampling of engaging work, ranging from the unusual to the more well-known from this period,” museum director Gregory Perry said. “The loans from major U.S. museums have never been exhibited at the Zimmerli, and complement the museum’s 19th-century holdings.”

“Breaking the Mold” offers insights into the aesthetics and purposes of sculpture and reveals the variety of sources from which artists found inspiration to break from academic conventions, including non-Western (Japanese), pre-Classical ancient art, and popular and folk art forms, according to museum material.

More than half of the sculptures presented in “Breaking the Mold,” fully 180 works, belong to the Zimmerli museum. These are supplemented by more than 100 sculptures by artists including Honoré Daumier, David D’Anger, Edgar Degas, Aristide Maillol, Henri Matisse, Auguste Rodin and others that are on loan from museums such as the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; and several private collections.

The works display the full range of media explored by the artists, including plaster, terra cotta, bronze, wax, wood and mixed media. The exhibition presents many unpublished works by lesser-known artists and puts them into context with works by major figures of the era, such as Degas, Rodin, Matisse, Paul Gauguin, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Constantin Brancusi.

The exhibition takes liberties with the generally accepted categories of sculpture by emphasizing three-dimensional caricatures and includes popular art forms such as puppets and zinc cut-outs for shadow theaters. It includes works related to major public monuments, and also explores sculpture’s relationship to the subject matter, aesthetics and commerce of its sister multiple art form — printmaking — featuring graphic works from the period by such artists as Daumier, Eugène Delacroix, Jean-François Millet, Edouard Manet and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Accompanying the exhibition is a fully illustrated catalogue with essays by exhibition curator Phillip Dennis Cate, who provides a historical overview of French sculpture between 1832 and 1914. Cate retired last month after 29 years with the museum.

Other contributors to the catalogue include Anne Pingeot and Edouard Papet, curators of sculpture at the Musée d’Orsay in France.

A second exhibition running at the Zimmerli is “Origins of the Twentieth Century: Watercolors and Drawings in France, 1875-1915.” The more than 200 watercolors and drawings were derived primarily from the museum’s holdings of turn-of-the-20th-century French graphic arts, concentrating in large part on the use of artists’ preparatory drawings in the creation of prints and illustrations for books and journals.

The Zimmerli art museum is on the College Avenue Campus of Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Its hours are Tuesday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and weekends from noon to 5 p.m. Admission is $3 for adults and free for museum members, Rutgers University students, faculty and staff, and children under 18.