Rodin gets his own ballet dancers
Culture in modern Cambodia is a delicate thing, as is much else, understandably, in that shaken, bewildered coultry. Mighty Angkor itself looks like it will easily hang on for another thousand years, but it’s chipped, part swallowed once more by the jungle, and missing a lot of pieces.
Not all those pieces have been disintegrated by weapons or stolen and taken abroad. Many are in the National Museum in Phnom Penh, but when I was there in 1994 a lot of statuary was piled in dusty stacks or strewn about as though the figures were waiting for a bus that might not come.
So it’s nice that Rodin’s come along.
I say “nice”, because it’s an odd perspective on Cambodia that he created in 1906. He made 150 drawings of traditional Khmer dancers who performed in France that year, and 40 of the works are on display at the Phnom Penh museum through February 11.
It’s nice that the French have not only arranged the centenary exhibition but paid for a wing of the museum to be renovated with temperature and humidity control, a first for steamy Cambodia, so that the drawings on paper are safe. The French controlled everything but the humidity in the country for nearly a century, finally relinquishing its former colony in 1953. The renovation cost all of $200,000. See the rest.
