Art: 98 Rodins

Near Mr. Kennerley on the deck of the Majestic stood Jules Mast-baum, cinema magnate. He submitted to the routine of cameras and notebooks with such a look of satisfaction as a man might wear who had just nipped off the end of a fine cigar or buried his nose in the bouquet of an old bottle.

Or perhaps he did not wear any such expression — perhaps it was merely the fancy of the beholders to perceive it, for everyone was thinking that Mr. Mastbaum had reason to be, and even to look, satisfied; he was returning from Paris where he had bought 98 Rodins.

“Imitations, of course,” suggested the dubious. “Originals!” thund ered Jules Mastbaum. The purchase, which involved a year’s negotiations with the French Ministry of Beaux Arts and with M. Benedite, venerable curator of the Musee Rodin, includes The Thinker (one of the five bronzes cast from the original mold) and reproductions of Adam and L’Ondre from the group at Rodin’s grave. Mr. Mastbaum will lend the collection to the SesquiCentennial Exposition at Philadelphia next year.

That any man could go to Paris and purchase 98 original bronzes by a sculptor who ranks in the very thin and isolated company of the world’s greatest artists, appears incredible—would be impossible, if it were not that Rodin, all his life, created images in stone as rapidly as if to do so were a natural, an inescapable function of his body. An eminent critic once stated that Balzac, the novelist, was not an individual but one of Nature’s forces, like fire or che wind; Rodin was treated with the same sort of primary electricity. He left as many wrought stones as a volcano —a giant’s spawn, beyond precise inventory; countless groups of lovers, nymphs, Naiads, Tritons, Muses.

Many people who know nothing and are capable of understanding less about sculpture are excited by the beauty that they instantly apprehend in Rodin; they grasp without effort subtleties of intention that the sophisticated perceive only tortuously, after elaborate reasoning. There is more in this fact than an illustration of the theory that only a stupid man has any capacity for learning. It contains two secrets of Rodin’s brooding intellect that ‘are also the secrets of his popularity:

First, he saw the beauty of the world, as in imbecile might see it, with the eyes of innocence. To understand him it is unnecessary to understand anything that happened before him except the creation of man. Second, he expressed what he saw with a graphic accent. His sculptures are stone syllables of a speech men suddenly realize that they know.

To reproduce in stone every rhythm of the human body became for him almost a monomania. He would have his model throw herself down over and over in different attitudes, any attitudes, and would draw her with fierce, scrawling strokes. How his Man with the Broken Nose was refused by the Salon jury is history; in 1877 he was accused of faking his Age of Bronze—now in the Luxembourg —by taking a mold from the living model. Good people have denounced his works wholesale as “erotic.” Academicians have stated that he^ combines a coarse literary mind with an inadequate technique, which is doubtless partly true—true also that he was never proficient as an artificer, could not work at the marble en bloc. “He has,” said the late James G. Huneker, “a hundred faults, to which he imposes one imperious excellence—a genius, sombre, magical and overwhelming.”

Beside Mr. Mastbaum’s, there are in the U. S. three notable collections of Rodins:

In the Metropolitan, Manhattan, 40 statues presented by Thomas F. Ryan.

In the Cleveland Institute, seven.

In the Chicago Institute, a smaller collection to which was recently added the Adam.