Museum explores monuments

Rodin Museum installation explores artist’s approach to designing public monuments

CENTER CITY >> The Rodin Museum’s newest installation, “Rethinking the Modern Monument,” explores Auguste Rodin’s innovative, and often controversial, approach to designing monuments intended for prominent display in public places.

The word “monument” traditionally conjures images of military heroes and revered leaders. However when the French sculptor was commissioned to create a monument, he typically chose subjects like artists, poets and intellectual figures, or gave form to emotions and abstract ideas. The 1870s until Rodin’s death in 1917 was a time of major political, social and economic change in France. In 1907 he stated this view to an art critic: “By convention, a statue in a public place must represent a great man in a theatrical attitude which will cause him to be admired by posterity. But such reasoning is absurd ... There is nothing more beautiful than the absolute truth or real existence.”

Varying in size and media, from life-sized statues in bronze to smaller plaster studies, “Rethinking the Modern Monument” asks questions like: What is the proper function of the public monument, what should it look like, who decides the subject and what form it should take?

In one gallery, Rodin’s animated design for “Scene from the French Revolution” (modeled in wax around 1879) is shown as an example of a commission he pursued, but never realized. It was intended for a monument in Paris that would have commemorated the creation of the French Republic.

Another gallery contains various studies for a figure of renowned French writer Honoré de Balzac. While Rodin’s initial intent was to portray Balzac in a realistic manner, it soon evolved into an ambitious effort to express the essence of the genius of the novelist and playwright. The sculpture was criticized when it was presented to the public in 1898.

Rodin’s first commission for a public monument was for the doors of a planned museum of decorative art. Modeled from 1880 through the remainder of Rodin’s life, and finally cast between 1926 and 1928, that doorway became the epic sculpture “The Gates of Hell.” A terracotta model in “Rethinking the Mod-

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART This bronze study, “Head of Sorrow (Joan of Arc)” by Auguste Rodin, was modeled circa 1882, enlarged in 1905 and cast 1925.

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART This version of “Balzac” by Auguste Rodin was cast in 1925. At the sight of the original sculpture’s unveiling in France, one critic found its originality thrilling, and likened it to a “slap in the face.” Another called it “a stupid monstrosity ... like a polar bear standing on its hind legs.”

PHOTO COURTESY OF THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM OF ART This plaster work, “Project for the ‘Monument to Eugène Carrière’” by Auguste Rodin, was modeled in 1912 and cast 1926.