The Berkshires’ Clark Looks at Rodin in America

Via Rodin, American collectors brought the French avant-garde stateside.

R odin in the United States: Confronting the Modern is the just-opened summer exhibition at the Clark Art Institute, in Williamstown, Mass. Clark’s big summer show, which premieres between Memorial Day and mid June, truly starts the Berkshire art season. Mass MoCA, Tanglewood, the Jacob’s Pillow dance company, Hancock Shaker Village, and the county’s theater festivals follow with programmatic gems planned during the months when the Berkshires are buried in snow, not to mention up to the ankles in mud in March and April.

It’s a beautiful show and perfect for the Clark. The Clark’s Rodin collection is small, but it owns, of course, a superb collection of Impressionist paintings. Through a nice Rodin show, the museum pushes its boundaries. Like all Clark shows, the arrangement of art is pitch-perfect and goes from high point to high point.

The exhibition isn’t organized chronologically insofar as Rodin’s production is concerned. Rodin tended to make forms and produce versions of them over and over, so The Age of Bronze appears at the end of the show, though the nude male figure first comes from Rodin in 1876. In terms of chronology, Confronting the Modern is an exhibition about Rodin in American collections. It’s organized chronologically by its acquisition history.

It starts with early exhibitions and acquisitions in the 1870s through the 1890s, Rodin’s breakthrough after 1910 or so, when the Met bought Rodin heavily and created a Rodin gallery, and obsessive collecting by people such as Philadelphia’s Jules Mastbaum, who formed the city’s Rodin Museum in the late 1920s.

The exhibition ends with the institutional collecting by MoMA, among other places, making Rodin feel contemporary, and Gerald and Iris Cantor’s massive Rodin collecting from the 1960s into the ’80s. The Cantors have given so many Rodins to so many museums that he’s in America’s pantheon of French art.

Rodin wasn’t a natural fit for American Gilded Age collectors, but neither was much avant-garde French art. French Impressionism, though visually beautiful and lively, was too sketchy for an aesthetic based on clarity and finish. And then there’s sex. Americans collected Orientalist harem scenes, which are hootchy-kootchy but crafted to the nines finish-wise and exotic. Rodin? Too much steam.

The Rodin show starts with a frisson and Cupid and Psyche, a marble done before 1886. It’s a nude embrace and both voluptuous and tender. It’s small, about 27 inches in length, but it lacks an erotic punch. Rodin exhibited it at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It wasn’t scandalous only because it was withdrawn to a private space for X-rated viewing. A bronze portrait bust of Arthur Jerome Eddy from 1898 introduces Rodin’s earliest collector. It’s edgy in its directness. Eddy’s face is planar and his shoulders dressed in an abstract suit and tie. Whistler painted a full-length portrait of Eddy. He owned work by Marcel Duchamp, Vuillard, and Picabia. His taste was advanced.

Rodin’s eroticism, or carnality is better, makes him decidedly post-Victorian. Rodin was modern in his process, too. Ceres and Thought are two marble busts where the heads sprout from roughly chiseled stone blocks. Rodin looked at them, seeing what most artists would have found unfinished, and declared them done. Rodin worshipped Michelangelo, who believed his figures already lived in a block of marble before he freed them. Rodin liked a look where forms emerged on their own from stone.

A small, early bronze Thinker from 1881 startled me with its rough, raw power. The Thinker and The Kiss, the two sculptures that everyone knows, are so present in our visual dictionary that they are just on the good side of kitsch. The Thinker, though, as a form, is a tough thing. Rodin conveys a nude, to be sure, but also deep, serious thought. It’s a powerful work of concept art.

All of Rodin’s hits are there. The exhibition’s honest, and possibly revelatory to lots of visitors, in another part of Rodin’s process. When he designed a work, he thought about its duplication. Forms such as The Thinker were designed to accommodate different scales and materials. Concept and design were Rodin’s work. He didn’t carve a thing. He sent his plaster or clay models to professional stone carvers or to foundries he knew well if they were to be bronzes. He tracked every step, though.

All the galleries look good, but one’s a feast. It’s at the center of the exhibition. A big space displays three sculptures, one near the center of the space and two diagonally from it to make a tricorn of splendor. The Prodigal Son, the heroic head of Pierre de Wissant from The Burghers of Calais, and The Thinker show us how formidably Rodin blends the physical, emotional, and intellectual. The Prodigal Son has the look of a late El Greco ecstasy figure, but, in three dimensions and in bronze, grips us. He’s real, but he looks wet and slick as the light hits the metal. Man with Serpent, a big plaster owned by the Clark, introduces the space. It draws from The Laocoön, the Hellenistic sculpture excavated in Rome in 1506. Rodin gives us a single figure, though, writhing with a serpent around his throat and torso. It’s very powerful, and Rodin integrated it into The Gates of Hell as one of dozens of figures in a state of apocalypse.

The last gallery shows Rodin’s most unorthodox, even anarchistic work. Dance Movement, at the end, is from 1911. It’s rooted in Degas’s dance and horse sculptures but also draws from Nijinsky’s ballets, which Rodin knew as a Paris sensation.

I loved the exhibition and recommend it. Rodin’s a great artist. I learned a lot. The art comes from museums all over the country. It’s lovely.

I have only a couple of very small quibbles. I like exhibitions about the curiosity, taste, and acquisitiveness of collectors. Sterling and Francine Clark, the Clark’s founders, were themselves idiosyncratic collectors, having means, passion, and an eye for quality. The challenge in these shows is to bring both artist and collector to life in the context of the art. The Rodin exhibition has the very best art. The exhibition’s not biographical, but Rodin shines as an inveterate envelope-pusher. He’s a vivid personality. The collectors? Not so much. A show that says it’s about American collectors of Rodin and his reception here has to take a deep dive. The collectors are the co-stars.

Some feel like cardboard cutouts. Alma de Brettville Spreckels, for example, the rich San Francisco socialite, had a passion for Rodin. At a tad over 6 feet in height, “Big Alma” dwarfed most men. This larger-than-average and larger-than-life figure seems like a name on a page.

Her father might have been a ne’er-do-well, but her mother had the smarts and grit to run a profitable bakery that also provided laundry services to Nob Hill’s potentates and had a massage parlor in back. Alma modeled nude for pay at the city’s art schools. She married the local sugar magnet Adolph Spreckels, nearly 25 years older than she, and coined the term “sugar daddy.”

Alma lived large and charitably. In 1914, visiting Paris, she met Rodin, adored his work, and him, and came home with a dozen bronzes. These became the foundation for her big museum project: the California Palace of the Legion of Honor. What did she see in Rodin’s work? It’s the nucleus of what has to be one of the most romantic museums in the country. Spreckels owned The Prodigal Son. Rodin was thrilled that he was able to “exaggerate the distance between the tendons that reveal the outburst of prayer,” but, let’s face it, Big Alma liked its orgasmic quality. She bought The Fallen Angel, another sexy bronze. The fallen angels were expelled from Heaven, roaming the earth as demons. Hey, Spreckels’s mother ran a massage parlor.

I’d take three or four of the more engaging Americans central to Rodin’s reception and portray them with the drama and embellishment they deserve. The American Claire Coudert married a French duke but became Rodin’s lover and one of his American agents. Her father founded Coudert Brothers, the posh New York law firm. Claire used her massive Rolodex to find and develop Rodin collectors.

The exhibition gives Loïe Fuller a close look. Silly me, I didn’t know Fuller was American. I assumed that this Paris stage sensation and favorite dancer of Toulouse-Lautrec, Chéret, and Maurice Denis was French, but no, she’s from Hinsdale, Ill., and started in American burlesque, vaudeville, and circus acts. Hey, my dusty old dissertation was on Washington Allston. I’m an Americanist specializing in Federal-period art. Fuller was also one of Rodin’s American agents, matching him with collectors with avant-garde taste. Still, I would have done more with Fuller, an interpretative dancer in the realm of Isadora Duncan.

Then there’s Jules Mastbaum, who opened Philadelphia’s first Nickelodeon before developing what became in the 1920s the world’s biggest chain of movie theaters. He established the Rodin Museum in Philadelphia, which opened in 1929. The catalogue has some good observations about Mastbaum, Rodin, and cinema. The movie pioneer believed that Rodin conveyed the immediacy, physicality, and emotion of cinema. Why not dive into this in the exhibition people see?

And then there are the Cantors. At one point, they owned around 500 works by Rodin. They gave most of them to museums, making Rodin physically ubiquitous. They get some ink in the exhibition and the book, but can we get some flesh and blood attached to these Rodin obsessives?

Katherine Seney Simpson and her husband were big and early New York collectors of Rodin. Mrs. Simpson was socially prominent enough to have a word about Rodin with the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which later bought his work in bulk. She gets lots of play in the exhibition, which is frank about highlighting Rodin’s women collectors at the expense of the men. Simpson’s good taste and advocacy aside, she doesn’t fascinate. She’s too staid. She’s boring.

This leads me to another tiny quibble, which I raise in fairness to Daniel Chester French but also because I just wrote about French and his home, Chesterwood, a few miles down the cow path from the Clark. Mrs. Simpson wasn’t exactly the decisive figure in Rodin’s centrality at the Met. She commissioned The Age of Bronze from Rodin as a gift to the Met. It’s a great thing. French was as important. He gets only a line or two in the exhibition and in the catalogue, and that’s too bad.

French joined the Met board as a trustee in 1903. He chaired its sculpture committee. He visited Rodin twice, once with Edward Robinson, the Met’s director, and engineered Rodin acquisitions. The big 1910 buy that followed was funded by money from Rodin patron Thomas Fortune Ryan. Ryan made his money from insurance, streetcars, and tobacco. He owned Royal Typewriter. Though living in New York, he was from Virginia and a bit of a Lost Causer, which might be why he’s cut out of the show, though he’s treated in the book. The Met’s Rodin gallery opened on French’s watch in 1912. The Simpsons’ own Rodin collection went to the National Gallery in 1942.

Since the exhibition is about Rodin and his collectors — individuals and museums — every label should have a vignette about provenance. Museums are institutional buyers, but there’s always a curator and director behind every acquisition. Some labels do identify them, but many don’t.

An exhibition can’t cover everything, but I’m curious about American Modernist sculptors who might have been inspired by Rodin. There’s French, of course, who worked into the 1920s, and Frederick MacMonnies, but how about Gutzon Borglum, Anna Hyatt Huntington, Harriet Frishmuth, Gaston Lachaise, and Paul Manship?

There are lots of Rodin drawings in the exhibition and a good essay on his drawings in the book. Rodin made almost 10,000 drawings of all types, so drawing was clearly central to him in developing his projects. Fewer than 200 drawings are in American collections, and I don’t think there was much of a market for them. Almost all of his drawings live in the Rodin Museum in Paris.

In the exhibition, they feel like wallpaper. Given that the show’s about Rodin, America, and Modernism, I don’t know why, intellectually, they’re there.

The catalogue is first-rate in content, design, and production values, like all Clark books. Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, the curator of the show, defines Rodin’s avant-garde style and process, both intertwined, especially in the 1890s when American collectors were first attracted to his work. The sculpture scholar Laure de Margerie reviews the American taste for French sculpture from Houdon to Gérôme and Barye. Gilded Age collectors liked French sculpture more than French painting since it fit an aesthetic of abundance and eclecticism. She ends her essay with élan and sets not the theme but the underlying spirit of the show. Rodin, she said, “was opening the twentieth century, not closing the nineteenth.”

I wish there were a companion essay on the state of American sculpture from, say, 1850 to 1900. In that field, the Europeans to emulate started with Italians and ended with the French. An essay of this kind could explore what American artists after 1900 drew from Rodin.

Essays on American private collectors and museum collections are mixed with object entries for everything in the exhibition. There’s an essay on the Rodin revival starting in the 1950s. I wish it were meatier. It’s only a couple of pages. There’s nothing about the market for Rodin.

Patrick Crowley’s “Staging the Gates of Hell” is that rare essay that’s scholarly and gossipy and delicious. In it, he writes about a furor in 1981 and 1982 at the center of which were Rosalind Krauss, a scholar of postmodern art I find tiresome, and Albert Elsen, a Rodin scholar who taught at Stanford. In the late 1970s, Elsen led the charge with the Rodin Museum in Paris and Cantor to make a new cast of Rodin’s Gates of Hell. Elsen, a leader in the museum profession, too, was part of a movement among curators and art historians to develop standards for posthumous versions, in bronze or stone, of sculptures. Rodin specifically authorized this as a way to finance the Rodin Museum, which he established and stocked with the contents of his studio. Krauss wrote a long essay stating that these works, coming after an artist’s death, were fakes. The waters turned turgid as they can only in academia.

If an artist authorized the production of bronzes, for instance, after his death under the supervision of a museum he established as keeper of the flame, the bronzes aren’t fakes. They’re posthumous editions and might very well be better than what came from Rodin’s foundry because of technology but also because of subsequent scholarship on Rodin. The issue isn’t fake versus real but bad versus good.

Crowley’s essay is on the tangential side, but it’s a good read and adds to the book’s attractive eccentricity. The Clark’s exhibitions and books aren’t ponderous and risk-averse. They’re usually right-sized, focused, and adept at raising new issues. The Clark is a conservative place, but its scholarship is solid and provocative. There’s nothing wrong with some spice in the cooking. The spice at the Clark is never contrived. It’s not a trendy place.

The Clark wandered from this brand in the late Aughts and in the Teens, doing too many limp treasures shows from other museums, contemporary-art shows, and trendy shows — such as a big opus about underexamined American women artists who studied in Paris. Their art’s underexamined because it’s underwhelming.

With the Rodin exhibition and the retrospective of the Norwegian artist Nicolai Astrup last year, the Clark seems to have recovered its quality brand. The museum was deeply in debt from its expansion and renovation, so it put all its programming on a starvation budget. It has paid the piper for mission creep and a spending spree, but money seems to have been freed up again for exhibitions that make a difference and are a pleasure.