Preview
RODIN: A MAGNIFICENT OBSESSION
Sculpture from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation
Curated by Monique Westra
Runs October 30 to January 30
Glenbow Museum
Auguste Rodin (1840-1917) has been called one of the greatest artists that ever lived – and publicly ridiculed as a fraud.
Now, for the first time in Calgary, Rodin’s reputation, his story and, most importantly, more than 60 of his bronze works are being showcased in an exhibition at the Glenbow Museum entitled Rodin: A Magnificent Obsession.
"Wow!" says Monique Westra, curator for the Glenbow show, as she spots yet another Rodin bronze being uncrated during an unofficial tour of three galleries on the museum’s second floor where Magnificent Obsession will be exhibited until the end of January.
"Wow" indeed. In a strange way, these luminescent sculptures – a touring selection from the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation, most recently exhibited in Ithaca, New York – seem like old friends that have been away for far too long. But the feeling of familiarity shouldn’t be a surprise; after all, the works of Rodin are among the most famous in the world.
They’re all here in one form or another: The Thinker, The Age of Bronze, The Kiss, The Gates of Hell and the Monument to Honoré de Balzac. These are sculptures that, in some instances, have become so popular that they have been reproduced on everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs, achieving iconic stature along the way.
"Rodin was widely celebrated as the greatest artist since Michelangelo," says Westra, who did her master’s thesis on Rodin’s Burghers of Calais at the University of Toronto. And the curator’s words are not hyperbole. At the zenith of his success, Rodin was trumpeted by nobility, pursued by a cadre of female admirers (among them sculptor Camille Claudel) and had a pavilion at the 1900 Paris World Exposition dedicated to 170 of his bronze, marble and plaster works.
Yet, despite fame, fortune and periods of acute admiration, Rodin still remains a controversial figure 87 years after his death.
The roots of the controversy go back to one of Rodin’s earliest sculptures, The Vanquished.
While working as a mason in Brussels from 1871 to 1877, the then-unknown artist began to create an untitled sculpture. For his model, he chose a soldier named Auguste Neyt. After taking time out to travel to Italy, where he witnessed firsthand the poetic work of Michelangelo, Rodin returned to Belgium and continued to create his life-size sculpture of a male nude that he later named The Vanquished.
The bronze sculpture in all its muscled glory was first exhibited in Brussels in 1877, where it was panned by two influential critics of the day. They accused Rodin of taking a cast directly from the live model in order to create the lifelike bronze. Renamed The Age of Bronze, it was later exhibited in Paris, but skepticism about the sculpture, and its maker, remained.
And ever since then, the story of Rodin cannot be properly told without also mentioning the controversy that continues to dog his reputation. In more recent times, it has revolved around the numerous casts of the artist’s bronzes that have flooded the marketplace. (See the Rodin Chaser story on this page.)
The origins of this explosion of art can be traced to Rodin himself. Surviving the doubt that surrounded The Age of Bronze, he went on to become a savvy self-promoter who had hundreds of copies of his most popular works created at multiple foundries in France. Today casts of casts are floating around, creating even more doubt and confusion about the authenticity and value of many of his bronzes.
However, that’s not an issue with the pieces selected for exhibition at the Glenbow. They are part of the largest private collection of Rodin works in the world, amassed thanks to the wealth and obsession of B. (Bernie) Gerald Cantor, who purchased his first piece 18 months after viewing Rodin’s The Hand of God at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City in 1945.
Cantor, an international financier who died in 1996, relied heavily on the knowledge and discriminating taste of Albert Elson to carefully select most of the pieces that today form a collection of more than 750 large- and small-scale bronzes – with more than 450 pieces of the collection donated to 70 museums. Elson was regarded as one of the foremost experts on Rodin’s work. For Cantor, he helped to create one of the most important collections of Rodin bronzes in the world, second only to that of the Musée Rodin in Paris.
And Rodin would surely be pleased to know that the Cantor Foundation, along with a legion of devotees, remains committed to prolonging his mythological status. To perpetuate his fame after death, Rodin willed that sculptures continue to be made from his casts (although, as of 1956, French law limits the number of casts to 12).
The pieces in Magnificent Obsession are all original Rodin works, with the vast majority made after Rodin died on Nov. 17, 1917. However, as Westra reminds viewers in her well-researched text panels and gallery notes, some of the pieces are believed to be "lifetime casts" (made when Rodin was alive).
In the end it’s an issue that is of little interest outside academic circles and to those who plunk down substantial wads of cash to purchase an authentic Rodin bronze. Rodin might laugh at all of the fuss, as he had little to do with the process after he created the original work, typically in clay. Instead, he would leave the rest of the labour to a phalanx of skilled craftspeople to execute his creative vision.
For this exhibition, Westra has carefully and intelligently placed the sculptures based on themes and interrelationships, highlighting the artist’s early works, his legacy of partial figures, his self-described masterpiece – the monument to the novelist Balzac – and his grandest project, The Gates of Hell – a 21-foot-high bronze depicting hundreds of figures, created for a proposed decorative arts museum in France that was never built. The latter is represented at the Glenbow by a maquette or preliminary model. Also featured are a series of bronzes, including a stunning life-size Adam figure on loan for the first time from the Art Gallery of Ontario.
Controversy, ego and marketing aside, Rodin’s bronze sculptures continue to stand the test of time because of their sheer beauty. And beauty is what made Bernie Cantor’s magnificent obsession with the art of Auguste Rodin so worthwhile. |
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