Word: rodine
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...moved by Mark di Suvero's "sculptures" [Dec. 1] to recall the quip, "No one ever went broke underestimating the good taste of the American public." Is floundering New York City financing the purchase of "Rodin-like images of survival and defiance...
However, these copies have probably reached more people than the unique works ever did. The Ben Franklin in the Fogg show has been a model for coins and postage stamps, and plastic statues of Rodin's "The Kiss" have been sold in mail-order catalogues. The purpose these sculptures serve in disseminating a knowledge of art over a large area makes up for any lack of artistic merit...
Many of these pieces--especially Carpeaux's "Lion Crushing a Serpent" and Rodin's "Man With a Broken Nose"--succeed in all their versions because the original forms built by the artist are still so strong. Others, like Daniel Chester French's (the man who sculpted John Harvard) oversentimentalized "Memory," have little artistic merit either in their original or successive states...
...make only small sculpture, which he did by welding steel plates on an asbestos apron spread on his lap. In 1963-64 he was able to continue a series of bronze hands begun in 1958−fists, palms skewered by rods, fingers clamped to a balk of timber. These Rodin-like images of survival and defiance are full of expressionist anguish. As autobiography they are corny but moving. On the other hand, the earlier small steel pieces are generally disappointing. They seem clogged by graphic cliches and distended by a frustrated longing for bigness...
Hirshhorn's instinct for painting seems to have been weaker than for sculpture. There, nobody could cavil at the major works he has supplied Washington-the Giacomettis, the Daumiers, at least some of the 15 Moores, Rodin's Burghers of Calais and stupendous Balzac, Picasso's Baby Carriage, and the great series of Matisse's Backs of a Woman, to name only...