MOMA Balzac, Bonjour, I’m Back.
Sunday afternoon at MOMA is when and where I go to amerce myself in a NYC throng. I landed back back home in Hell’s Kitchen just a few days ago. Walking a few blocks east on the beaten path to The Museum of Modern Art, something of interest is always happening. I had imagined myself watching people watching art but my attention rose above the dense crowd to Rodin’s sculpture, “Monument To Balzac”. That stoic bronze testament to testosterone that I grew up with outside in the sculpture garden now towers over us from inside the lobby, in front of the garden. This location, with the constant flow of art and attention seekers creates a stark contrast between the human tide flowing around the base and the upward sweep (about 10 feet) to the top of the massive head.
Upstairs, the exhibition, “Color Chart”, will close soon but I can’t help wondering what Rodin would have thought of it. The horizontal sweep (about 20 feet) of Judd’s sculpture, a closed rectangular box of painted aluminum, is composed of smaller colored rectangles. The industrial colors are taken, literally, from the standardized commercial color chart of Europe, RAL. Would Rodin have been outraged by what might have appeared to him as the shipping container for his Balzac, left on the gallery floor? Personally, I enjoyed peeking up and over the top edge and across the vista of color.
In 1963, Albert E. Elsen said in his book, “Rodin”, published concurrently with a major exhibition of Rodin’s work at MOMA, “For some, the Balzac was a symbol of the aberrations of fin-de-siecle(1898) mentally, while the more charitable claimed that it
possessed “too much philosophy and not enough modeling”. When the commission was refused, Rodin wrote in defence of his last great masterpiece “…but I believe in the truth of my principle; and Balzac, rejected or not is none the less in the line of demarcation between commercial sculpture and the art of sculpture that we no longer have in Europe.” The sculpture was never cast in bronze during the artist’s lifetime.
The artists of “Color Chart” cross the line of demarcation. Just beyond the Judd at the entrance, big names like Stella, Warhal, Johns and Duchamp use commercial color and anything else from the market place that they damn well please. “We have everything, everything, everything”, is the cry of my favorite barker on canal street. This good old boy’s club of modern masters is a chest to chest shouting match between the psyche of the creative mind and commerce. Their creative output would otherwise have been commercialized without compensation. They are just staying ahead of the curve. I will use you using me using you.
Curator Ann Temkin realizes the highly evolved spiritual contribution of color in her introduction. The approach of “Color Chart” is the antithesis of the slow maturation and eventual realization of a personal expression of color. But self-expression can be obtained from the outside in. Liken it to the process of the Buddhist smile meditation. All this advertising got you down? A little smile on the lips and the facial muscles do the work inward. Even a smirk can fool the message to the brain and trick the most cynical art critique. Use it in the crowd, others smile back, there now, don’t you feel better? I do.
“Not even death, however, but his steadfast adherence to naturalism and certain of it’s traditions prevented Rodin from entering into the new territories that were being surveyed and colonized by younger sculptors of the twentieth century.” This comment
by Elsen touched me personally. After 40 years of painting and integrating all aspects of technique and subject matter at will, I just spent March and April dedicated to a purely expressionist approach to paint and blank canvas. Working mostly outside, my only stimulus was brisk air. I discovered that to expose my higher nature, I must let go of naturalism. Not to say where this is leading, for I see the value in the motion but I can’t see around the next bend.
Rodin returned life to sculpture, a Spring thaw of the rigidity of an aesthetic frozen in the past. Great innovators appear at the point of the motion of the great spiral of creativity when the arc on the curve is about to bend and blend into the next. Art history has a shape and it is not the straight time line. The shape of art time curves and expands and contracts and demands nothing. Except an open mind.
MOMA, Balzac, Au Revoir, I’ll be back.