September 16, 2017 to January 15, 2018
1000 Fifth Avenue
New York City, metmuseum.org

On November 17, 1917, France lost Auguste Rodin, a titanic sculptor and by some lights France’s last. By 77, after youthful failures (thrice rejected by the École des Beaux Arts), recurrent bouts of self-doubt, misprizal, and neglect, miseries more than matched by dogged perseverance and unshakable dedication to an artistic quest that he abandoned only once to a brief stay in a monastery after his sister’s death, Auguste Rodin had achieved international distinction. His centenary is being celebrated this year in the form of major museum exhibits worldwide as well as by programs, books, articles, and a dedicated website in his honor, a movie. Among these, an exquisite display has just opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that will remain a permanent installation there (the adjacent gallery with works on paper and Steichen’s photographs of the Balzac adhere to the exhibition dates). Comprised mainly of the Cantor Collection, the display greets visitors entering from the east end with two monumental figures turned away from them. To the right is Eve, banished and crushed with remorse. To the left is Adam, his head pendant, an image that will be tripled on the Gates of Hell. In the center of the space, mounted on a four foot high pedestal, sits The Thinker in a bronze casting of no more than two feet.   Three backs greet us: three works of art seen from behind, works by an artist who asks us not to stand still but to move, to change position, to keep looking, asking, and reflecting. This installation of Rodin’s work by the distinguished sculpture curator Denise Allen serves as a supreme aesthetic tribute to its restless master.

Dwelling all summer in Paris “with” the artist, so to speak, contemplating his Burghers in differing light and weather, poring over Ruth Butler’s riveting biographical pages among others, strolling the streets of the various arrondissements where he worked—at first in cold ateliers shivering while wrapping his clay to keep it moist and later surrounded by students, including Camille Claudel, acolytes, and skilled assistants—I introduced his sculptures to students abroad, both at the Musée Rodin and the centennial exhibition taking place at the Grand Palais, and dreamt about him by night. Increasingly, it became evident to me that Rodin was au fond a compulsive modeler, never a carver: it felt right to flee his famous marbles (the emblematic stone Kiss, Hand of God, Cathedral) for his bronzes, his waxes and terra cottas, his fragments, cropped bodies, accidents cast as such, plasters with their rods left in, and crude small works. In my quest for confirmation of this hunch—that Rodin’s genius is found in his fingers—I suddenly recalled Leo Steinberg.

The great art historian’s stunning 1963 essay on Rodin (augmented in 1971 as the last chapter of Other Criteria) has never been surpassed on its subject. Steinberg’s insights richly reward re-reading in this commemorative year. They supply conceptual ties, moreover, between Rodin’s art and much sculptural work that followed in the twentieth century. Steinberg recounts his lifelong fascination with Rodin, starting when he was ten years old and saw the iconic marbles in sepia reproduction on the pages of Rilke’s 1903-07 meditations on the artist when serving as his secretary in Paris. Then as modern art flourished and Rodin’s oeuvre went into eclipse, Steinberg too suffered a predictable disenchantment with it. But subsequently, this being the core of his essay, he awakened to a new comprehension of Rodin: Rodin as, beyond all else, an incessant modeler (rather than a carver) whose “real self had gone underground.” It is Rodin’s full oeuvre that must be engaged, especially his multiple smaller works, which demand being brought into focus and examined with care. They are what matter most. Not the world-famous stone pieces and monuments, wrought by others albeit under Rodin’s aegis, for in them the exploratory touch goes missing—that burst of energy which makes and unmakes form in flurries of protean ambiguity—an ambiguity forever denied to the unforgiving mallet and chisel. To mount a case for Rodin, an artist often misunderstood, as a harbinger of modern art, one can do no better than take Steinberg for one’s guide. In what follows, I shall do just that. Steinberg’s eagle eye, his erudition, and his own direct studio experience equip him to reveal just how, in this case, modeling prefigures modernity.

It has long been recognized, ever since Rodin’s first rejection by the Salon in 1865 (for his mask of the Man with the Broken Nose), that he breaks ground with academic norms by erupting with those modeling hands of his right up to the final stages of his art. We intuit his fingers in each bump, groove, rough and savage texture, each harsh or delicate correction. Rodin’s refusal of closure compels us toward co-creation of our own as we look on. He plies his art moreover with an openness that extends to theme as well as form. Take the Burghers of Calais. Anathema at first to patrons because they saw it as diverging from prevailing academic norms for public monuments, Rodin meant it to incarnate the duality of ignominious defeat and raw courage in the face of enmity. While subsequent scholarship has altered the historical record (Jean-Marie Moeglin, a scholar at Paris XII, writing in The Guardian, 8/14/ 2002, argues that the events in Calais were neither as unusual, heroic, or sacrificial as was previously thought), Rodin’s masterpiece stands. Obsessively re-working it, figure by figure, its heads, arms, and hands, limb by limb, he strives to embody the fundament of human tragedy, the ground of this 14th-century legend of six brave men striding forth together from a besieged French town, ready to die to save their fellow citizens. From brute matter, he wrests a wrenching tribute that eclipses all narrative revision. Steinberg, writing on the magnificent figure of Jean d’Aire, one of the six, speaks of “how desperately these statues act out the drama of powerful bodies giving their whole strength to the labor of holding on.” And this, Steinberg adds, is what is necessary to be a man.

But holding on also matters in reverse for Rodin, who is equally obsessed with the “threat of imbalance which serves like a passport to the age of anxiety.” Think of the precariousness of Icarus, and recall the Prodigal Son whose outsized arms, raised wildly aloft, threaten to capsize him backwards. Bastien Lepage balances dangerously on his pedestal, palette in hand, and what about Falling Man on the Gates of Hell? Steinberg points to a “hovering” aspect inherent in so many of Rodin’s works, an unstable relation to any ground. Interpreting this with him as a symbol of the anxiety that will come tearing in with the advent of modernism, I wonder whether it might also serve as an analogue of the modeling process per se—which goes on and on, unlike carving, and never reaches the terra firma of certainty.

What about replication? Rodin reuses figures. And fragments. He reiterates them, adds to them, transports them from one site of aesthetic or semantic significance to another: Think of Paola and Francesca on the Gates of Hell and of Fugit Amor, or the Prodigal Son, who morph and reappear in the former work. Such re-visionings point backward in time perchance to the pounding hoof-beats of multiple horses profiled on the Parthenon frieze and simultaneously they prefigure incredible repetitions in modernity as detailed by Walter Benjamin in his classic 1935 essay—the work of art as infinitely replicable by mechanical and now digital technology. The repetition also figures an inner obsession, a mental perseveration. Steinberg points to Rodin’s “cross-breeding” of forms, his borrowing of figures and body parts and re-assigning them: how the exquisite Torse d’Adèle reappears both in Eternal Spring and on the Gates. No Rodin work is known, Steinberg avers, until it is beheld in all its adaptability, until the body is understood not as an integral whole but as imperfect, as fissured, cracked, distorted according to its momentary purpose: this, he implies in his reading of Rodin, is the human body’s greatest truth.   But something deeper than momentary impression matters here: an expression of force that dwells in the act and therein finds its authenticity. Think of the small bronze and terra cotta dancers in the Musée Rodin, those coils of clay simply bent and twisted into miracles of exertion and intense extension.

Steinberg speaks of Rodin’s art in terms of what he calls “pure sculptural energy.” In so doing, he cites the bronze Figure volante of 1890 as an example of directional motion foreshadowing the pure abstraction of Brancusi’s 1923 Bird in Space. Rodin’s art is an art that cannot be finished but only abandoned or reworked, he states, and he imagines a secret dream on Rodin’s part of keeping each work ongoing forever. Above all, Steinberg shows how energy, inert matter, and time make of the part a whole, “wholeness wholly immanent in the fragment.” This is modernity tout court and, with it, we can better parse the ways in which later artists have and will continue to draw upon Rodin.

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August 1 to November 1, 2010
11 West 53 Street, between 5th and 6th avenues
New York City, 212 708 9400

Art has its objects and MoMA has its mediums.

Considering how much energy artists of the last 120 years have put into subverting boundaries, testing conventions, inventing ostentatiously category-defying new techniques, and tapping emphatically non-fine art technologies it is supremely curious that modernism’s principal collecting and theorizing institution is so rigidly organized by medium-defined curatorial departments. Prints and Illustrated Books, Drawings, Film and Media, Photography: what a glutton for punishment MoMA is, to demarcate so unruly a period along the lines of the very disciplines it subverted.

Even stranger, having divvied up the century by medium, is that the two time-hallowed activities that witnessed most acutely the striving for medium specificity are actually thrust together.  Painting and Sculpture is the grand duchy among the fiefdoms—perhaps, indeed (along late Hapsburg lines) the dual monarchy. MoMA’s taxonomy spotlights a struggle at the heart of modernism between materialism and transcendence, essence and dissolution—the very codependency, perhaps, that keeps painting and sculpture together.

Enter the fray an exhibition that offers a provocatively novel take on the interplay of mediums, The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today.  Organized by Roxana Marcoci, a curator from Photography, this refreshing, audacious, thought-provoking survey brings together some marvelous photography—but it tells a sad tale about sculpture.  For the show reinforces many of the problems with institutional modernism’s definitions of mediums.  As this show argues, photography is the medium through which the majority of people in the world have come to know sculpture – André Malraux’s “museum without walls” – and yet in its democratizing of sculpture the young medium has played snake to sculpture’s Laocoön, feeding voraciously on a dying hero.

This might seem like miscasting to the traditional view in which painting, not sculpture, is usurped by photography. My point is that while, in reproduction, painting loses, never mind its aura Walter Benjamin, its surface and color and relative size it keeps its dimension and at least its internal scale.  Sculpture, on the other hand, is at the mercy of photography’s interpretation of it.  Context trumps intention. Sculpture, you could say, becomes an extra in its own biopic. At the very historic juncture, furthermore, at which sculpture insists on truth to materials, and demands to be experienced “in the round,” it suffers to be flattened to be better known.

The Original Copy compounds sculpture’s problem by presenting joint winners and a poor third among various strands of sculptural photography. There is photography of sculpture, and photography as sculpture. The  consolation prize goes to photography for sculpture. Where it could be the subject of photography sculpture becomes its motif, which is not the same thing.  And as the camera becomes the means by which the sculptor reconceived the medium as whatever it is that he or she, the sculptor, is doing, rather than a thing or a process (art’s objects), the camera hastened the demise of medium specificity.  Painting is either alive or dead.  Sculpture, on the other hand, must endure a sort of zombie state in which it is congratulated for looking so healthy when actually it has ceased to be a cast, or a carving, or a welded or assembled thing, to become instead merely a found (as likely by the camera as the hand) object or a walk in the countryside or the artist singing vaudeville on a table in the gallery with his boyfriend.

Ms. Marcoci steps into sculpture and yet steps around it at the same time.  She gives us, in her medium, the fate of another medium. And yet her show – kudos for honoring the boundaries of medium-balkanized MoMA – is devoid of sculpture. One section of the show – its geographic but not thematic heart – packs a veritable retrospective of Constantin Brancusi’s own photographs of his own sculpture in a display of 26 prints, predominantly borrowed from the Centre Pompidou. In a feat of restraint – or missed opportunity – there are no examples (as there could easily have been) of the very works the Romanian photographed.  If there had been, an updated definition of sculpture would have presented itself as being what you bump into when you step back to admire a photograph of a sculpture.

The show claims a thematic organization, but is actually more chronological than intended, for a definite narrative unfolds. At the outset, photography is at the service of sculpture.  By the middle, it flips, to devour sculpture, to deny that statuary and ornaments are distinct from any other class of object one might encounter in life.  And in the end, photography is sculpture, whichever side of the lens the sculptor places him or herself.

“Sculpture in the Age of Photography,” the show’s opening section, marks an innocent moment when the camera quivers humbly before ancient stones.  A Lorraine O’Grady conceptual work juxtaposing a portrait of a contemporary African-American woman and Nefertiti’s sister Mutnedjimet, or Barbara Kruger’s Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face (1981), try to throw us off the path, but these accent, rather than disrupt, a display of often exquisite photographs of classical and renaissance statues. Adam Fenton, William Henry Fox Talbot or Stephen Thompson are let loose in the British Museum or places like it, while Clarence Kennedy captures loving details in a 1933 set of The Tomb by Antonio Rosselino for the Cardinal of Portugal. Whether these images are viewed in intentional terms as functional or formal, as essays in light and shade they exploit photography’s capacity to capture textures, to engender a sense of the object’s visceral presence.  Sculpture, in return, was the perfectly behaved sitter when long exposure required composure.

Rodin hijacks this calm formalism to insist on the melodrama of chiaroscuro in heavily directed images of his works.  Whether from Eugène Druet, Jacques-Ernest Bulloz, or most famously the American Edward Steichen, the sculptor enlisted interpretative artists to serve up propaganda for his romanticism.  Steichen’s portrait of the master in Rodin – The Thinker (1902) employs double exposure to abut bronze and marble, maker and made.  The other side of Rodin was that he opened up his creative process to photography, documenting the evolution of sculptural ideas.  Rodin tapped opposing powers of photography, to evoke mystery and to demystify.

While Rodin threw open the studio doors to photography, Eugène Atget, that industrious flâneur, took a camera around the metropolis, as far as Versailles, to capture baroque statuary in a campaign that was at once encyclopedic and wistful.  From his gentle humor The Original Copy segues to the sharper ironies of Dada.  Dust Breeding (1920), Man Ray’s photograph of Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Stripped Bare lying in shattered grace in a New York loft, is co-attributed on the exhibition label to both men.  But why? This is a photograph by one of the masters of that medium.  The sculpture that is its subject is cropped and in a state of decay .  (It would subsequently be cleaned by Duchamp and reassembled, some of its dust fixed into selective areas of the glass.)  Yes, the maker of the object collaborated, perhaps directed, the photographer.  But Rodin is not co-credited on any of the images that he, arguably more forcefully directed than the legendarily laissez-faire Duchamp.

This theme of authorship will take two further twists in the course of The Original Copy.  Where Duchamp and Man Ray share the author line of their label, each one in capital letters, by the last segment of the show, “The Performing Body as Sculptural Object,” the artist is the performer not the snapper.  Yves Klein is the credited artist in Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void, rendering his feat all the more acrobatic.  In parentheses, on the small print line of medium details, Harry Shunk and János Kender are credited for the photograph.  And this from a curator from Photography.

Similarly credited are Peter Moore for Yayoi Kusama, Robert R. McElroy for Robert Whitman and for Jim Dine, Max Baker for Red Grooms, Julian Wasser for Claes Odenburg, and so on.  And in this section, for Tonsure (1921), in which a pipe smoking Duchamp, with a star shaved into his scalp, is photographed from behind, it is “MARCEL DUCHAMP …. (…photograph by Man Ray.)”  The label for the photograph of Gilbert and George performing Great Expectations (1972) is unencumbered with the name of any photographer. I for one can’t tell whether this is because Gilbert and George set up the camera on a timer themselves or because the photographer was some jobbing hack paid by the hour who forgot to leave a calling card.

In the historical process by which sculpture is no longer a thing one has made somewhere else, but is instead a gesture made before the camera, a curious upstairs-downstairs, gentlemen and players game of class is enacted – a coda to the paragone debates (Leonardo versus Michelangelo) of the high renaissance.  Now that the sculptor no longer “gets dirty” – from sculpture that is; he or she gets more than dirty, as Dine and Kusama and Gilbert and George and Cindy Sherman all demonstrate, in their performances – the dematerialization of the art object elevates the sculptor to a higher class, the class of thinking (rather than making) artist, to be rewarded with attributed authorship of works (photographs) they didn’t make.  And to earn that honor they had to stop making works in their own medium.

Everything started so amicably in this show, with albumen virtually caressing marble, that the divorce half way through of photography and sculpture, with no joint custody, is all the more brutal. Dropped from the narrative are non-celebrity photographers who actually enriched their medium at the service of sculpture: I’m thinking of John Riddy’s work for Anthony Caro for instance or Aurelio Amendola’s on Michelangelo. (Incidentally, why are there no Henry Moore photographs of Henry Moore?)

As to the divorce: On the one side are first rate image makers for whom second rate statuary happens to be their motif.  Lee Friedlander, for instance, who covers America as intrepidly as Atget did Paris to catch the bathos of small town Civil War memorials; or the South African David Goldblatt whose lens is attuned to a bitter sweet post-Apartheid topography, as in Monument Honoring the “Contribution of the Horse to South African History,” Erected by the Rapportryers of Bethulie in 1982. Laura Rautenbach was the Sculptor (2005) in which the earnest work of a pompier animalier has had to be placed in a huge cage to keep thieves off the bronze.

On the other side are photographers whose capture of wondrous forms in nature or culture constitutes a kind of found sculpture, brought to life in two dimensions: Polish photographer Alina Szapocznikow’s Photosculptures of 1971 directly recall Brassaï’s Involuntary Sculpture series, close by, of 1932.  Interspersed among various kitsch findings of the young sculptor Rachel Harrison are a few shots of historic sculpture, in Voyage of the Beagle 2007. These works are heir to a genre that could be classed as the sculptural photograph – the marionettes, dummies, prosthetic limbs and dismembered dolls of André Kertész, Hans Bellmer, Eward Weston, Walker Evans and Iwao Yamawaki – that fills a section titled “The Pygmalian Complex: Animate and Inanimate Figures.”

They say child of divorce can still respect both parents, and that perhaps is the case with Cyprien Gaillard, the young French artist (savior, to my mind, of the New Museum’s Younger than Jesus) whose installation of Geographical Analogues is the closest thing the show has to sculpture.  In table mounted frames with concave bases he has assembled diamond grids of nine Polaroids each (shades of the Bechers) of distressed and forlorn sculptures from various eras, whether prehistoric dolmens or grim World War II memorials, often amidst vandalized utopian housing projects.  Gaillard is rather like a land artist whose nature happens to be failed sculpture.

Rodin and Brancusi could attempt, through deft camera work of their own or others, to steer viewers’ experience of their work.  For earthwork or land artists like Robert Smithson, Michael Heizer and Richard Long, the camera, used with less artistry, is more urgently required, to reify conceptual or remote or ephemeral happenings that would otherwise be lost.  The photograph is a souvenir of an event few if any viewers can have witnessed.  This is the truly original copy as it alone was intended to survive, and it alone can originate a response.

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