After nearly a decade in Philadelphia, I finally went to the Rodin Museum last week, a relatively small building a few blocks down the Ben Franklin Parkway from the Philadelphia Museum of Art, only to remind myself of something I already knew – that sculpture, as such, leaves me profoundly unmoved.
Architecture fascinates me. I’ve burst into tears spontaneously in front of paintings by everyone from Delacroix to Pollock. But I cannot recall ever having a major emotional reaction when confronted by a three-dimensional free-standing work of art.
There is something about the trick of mass, especially when thrown into the referential palette of the human figure – especially the idealized, romanticized form of so many of Rodin’s works (look at the outsized hands & feet of the Burghers of Calais, all the better to express the humanity of their oncoming doom – even the naked figure of Balzac takes on the bathos of heroism here) – that lessens mass itself, as if the weight of so much grace were somehow hollow.
There was a bus tour of seniors shuffling about – perhaps 80 percent female, all of them seemingly tiny, whispering in hushed awe – they felt to me as lively & as welcome as a circus in this mausoleum. In contrast with Rodin’s symbolic monsters – at one point I tried to imagine all of his sculptures as giant chocolate Easter bunnies – I felt excited to be in even glancing contact with all this life. When they were hustled – to the degree that one can hustle a group whose average age must be 85 – back to their bus, the emptiness of the building was overwhelming.
Indeed, the most impressive thing about the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia itself is the building that houses it, designed by Paul Cret (who did many of the major public works around Philadelphia, from the Ben Franklin Bridge & the modern design of Rittenhouse Square to the arch at Valley Forge, as well as works elsewhere including the Detroit Institute for the Arts)and Jacques Gréber. A Beaux Art building, it has one large gallery with translucent skylight & a generous use of marble, surrounded by a half dozen smaller rooms & alcoves. The 125 Rodin works therein (there are two outside, including The Gates of Hell pictured at the top of this note & Rodin’s signature Thinker) are contained by their environment, which feels open & airy.
The museum presents the collection created by early film theater magnate Jules Mastbaum & Mastbaum’s project is worth contrasting with the Barnes Foundation collection a few miles west in Lower Merion – another Paul Cret building – that represents the artistic vision of cough syrup baron Albert Barnes. Barnes, who put his collection together during the same general period for less than $200,000, has an unparalleled set of Renoirs, Matisses, Gaugins, Van Goghs, Modiglianis, Picassos that are mounted chockablock next to African masks & spoon collections, a sense of gathering together that really represents an intellectual vision, quirky & brilliant. For his part, Mastbaum was a man with money & a little bit of taste who was purchasing works by the most established sculptor of the period. Where the Barnes Foundation represents a bricoleur’s mind, the Rodin Museum is all about consumption, even if it is tastefully done with an anachronistic “$3 donation suggested” collection box & a closet of a gift shop.
Most of the works in the museum were in fact not cast until Rodin himself had been dead for 8 or 9 years, cast from the plaster moulds that were made from Rodin’s clay prototypes – that’s one reason why there are so many examples of The Thinker around¹ – mostly at the Parisian foundry of Alexis Rudier, who worked directly with Rodin but who had himself passed away in 1897, the business being carried on by his heirs. Mastbaum’s collection not only has representations of all of Rodin’s major works, but Mastbaum himself paid to have the first & second instances of the “masterwork” Gates of Hell, designed originally for a museum that never got off the ground, cast. Gates is, at best, an unfinished hodge-podge, massive bronze doors that contain in miniature instances of many of Rodin’s major works, The Thinker included.
Looking at Rodin, the sculptor who comes to mind most immediately is Jeff Koons. Rodin’s romantic heroism is unironic but no less stylized & distancing than Koons’ in-your-face puppy dogs. Both use mass not to explore its dimension – a modernist project I could get behind – but for its symbolism & especially its ability to intimidate viewers. A morning with Rodin will make you appreciate Christo & Jeanne-Claude all the more.
¹ A second reason is a healthy market for Rodin forgeries.
