Six Hundred Attend Michener Art Museum Members Reception for “Rodin: The Human Experience”
The Michener Art Museum the evening of the Members Reception for “Rodin: The Human Experience”
Michener Museum members admire Rodin’s 1892 “Nude Study of Balzac (Type C)”
At the Member Reception, Cantor Executive Director and Curator Judith Sobol (l), Michner Director & CEO Lisa Tremper Hanover, and Director of the Ross Gallery at the University of Pennsylvania Lynn Marsden-Atlass (r)
On February 28 the Foundation’s acclaimed new exhibition of sculpture by Auguste Rodin opened at the Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. The members’ opening reception, on a snowy Friday evening, was attended by 600 people who celebrated the selection of 52 works, all from the Cantor collections. The exhibition at the Michener is augmented by a superb small show of sculpture and drawings by contemporary American artists, many of whom are represented in the Museum’s collection or on loan from friends of the Museum.
Included in the exhibition, which will travel through 2017, are Metamorphosis of Ovid, Despairing Adolescent, Fugitive Love, Fallen Caryatid with Stone and Fallen Caryatid with Urn, as well as Bust of Jean Baptiste Rodin, Heroic Bust of Victor Hugo, and Monumental Head of Balzac. On special loan to the Michener for this exhibition is the North Carolina Museum of Art’s 15-inch cast of The Thinker (a 2009 gift to the NCMA from the Cantor Foundation).
The Michener is presenting a menu of programs to augment the exhibition. A four-part lecture series was kicked-off on March 3 by Cantor Foundation Executive Director Judith Sobol, the exhibition’s curator. Her talk related the story of the creation of Iris and Bernie Cantor’s impressive collection of works by Rodin, which at one time numbered 750 pieces. It also described Rodin’s remarkable achievement in transforming traditional sculpture into modern sculpture, using works in the exhibition as examples. Sobol’s talk will be followed in March and April by presentations by Jennifer A. Thompson, curator of the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s Rodin Museum and by its conservator Katherine Cuffari, recently part of a team that treated the PMA’s cast of Rodin’s The Gates of Hell. The Michener has also planned a talk on Rodin’s legacy by its senior curator of exhibitions, Kirsten Jensen, who put together a show demonstrating Rodin’s influence on succeeding artists, a complement to the Cantor show. Also planned are tours of Philadelphia’s Rodin Museum, gallery talks about Rodin’s formal achievements, and visits to contemporary artists’ studios.
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