Dali House

Among the Tinkertoy scaffold of bones supporting the needlessly beautiful tombstones at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris are (probably) the ones that carried around the man who painted this picture, which was fairly famous even before it became an Internet favourite.

Local boy Edouard Joseph Dantan painted “A Casting from Life” in 1887, when he was 39. That was 10 years before his death in an accident that left him well beyond plaster casts, and 10 years after The Great Rodin Scandal, in which France’s acknowledged master of sculpture was accused of having cast his “Age of Bronze” from life.

(He didn’t; it wasn’t. See this post and the Rodin website for the 19th century’s version of The Great Britney Spears Lip-Synching Scandal.)

Edouard Dantan’s whole family must have been alternatively amused and flabbergasted at the Rodin soap opera. His father and uncle were both celebrated sculptors too, but with a decidedly more relaxed approach to the techniques used, and why not surmoulage — life plaster casts of the model?

Edouard’s grandfather sculpted in wood, his father Jean-Pierre in marble and his uncle Antoine Laurent Dantan in clay and bronze. There’s a fair bit of confusion online about the brothers, and Edouard too, whose name gets several different spellings and whose birthplace is given as either Paris or its western suburb St Cloud, where his father was born.

The confusion carries on right to the grave. The grand “ancient tomb”, as it’s called for some reason, is in Lachaise’s fourth division, where Gioacchino Rossini, Georges Haussmann, Felix Flaure, Ludovico Visconti and Colette, the beloved creator of Gigi, also rest.

The family grave is midway up the entrance avenue at the cemetery.

This photo comes from Appl-Lachaise.net. The grave stone is adorned with weeping caryatids, cherubs with bleating trumpets and four marble medallions bearing the likenesses of “Dantan father & Young Dantan” and “Mrs Dantan & Elder Dantan”. I’m left to assume this means the brothers and their parents, but is this also the final home of Edouard’s bones?

Matthew Innis, who has quite a few works by Edouard on his interesting blog Underpaintings, quotes from a 2002 biography in saying that Edouard was buried in St Cloud, but the same book says he was buried next to his father, and Dad, evidently, is here in Paris.

Most visitors to the cemetery are reportedly seeking Antoine’s grave if it’s a Dantan they seek. Whether older or younger than Jean-Pierre (again, sources differ), he achieved greater celebrity by moulding caricatures of celebrities. But then, according to some sources, including Sotheby’s, that’s what Jean-Pierre did too, and Wikipedia says that Jean-Pierre was the more famous. “The brothers are sometimes confused in reference sources,” it adds helpfully. See the rest.

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.

Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) lived and sculpted at 54 Rue de Montparnasse. The Romanian had been a studio assistant to Auguste Rodin but ventured far into stylisation with such breathtaking works as “Bird in Space”, which US Customs would only admit as an industrial item (a propeller, officials thought), not art. The case went to trial: It was art.

He’s buried in the Cimetière du Montparnasse, where you can also see several statues he made for fellow artists who committed suicide, among them “The Kiss”.

Quite a character, Brancusi, mostly blue. Tsuguharu (often called Leonard) Foujita (1886-1968) was another character, but mostly red.

His first studio was at 5 Rue Delambre, initially the apartment of his wife Fernande Barrey, and from there he became an exceedingly popular artist in the 1920s, even winning the Order of Belgium and Legion of Honour. See the rest.

Continued from here.

In 1894 Rodin visited Claude Monet’s lush estate in Giverney, where he met Paul Cézanne. The painter’s country garden may have spurred him to buy the Villa des Brillants in Meudon, which he’d been renting since 1893. Here he began amassing his collection of antiques and paintings.

This Louis XIII villa of red stone and brick stands on a rise overlooking the Val Fleury, its vast grounds sloping to the River Seine. The sculptor gradually made it a workplace, buying neighbouring homes and turning them into studios and offices to accommodate the 50 or so assistants he employed by 1900.

One room became “the studio of antiquities”, a gallery for his work and the Old World pieces he collected, and elsewhere hung paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, among others.

Until 1900, although Rodin continued to spend every day at his Paris studios, it was in the intimacy of Meudon that he accomplished his most creative work. See the rest.

In the winter of 1875 Auguste Rodin was 35 years old and riding the train from Brussels, where he was earning his keep decorating public buildings, to Italy, where he was beginning a lifelong habit of collecting artwork. The coach stopped in Reims, in northeastern France, and he had a good look at its famed mediaeval Cathedral of Notre Dame.

Thirty-three years later, when he was 68, he placed together two larger-than-life casts of of the same right hand and called the result “The Cathedral”. By then he had become the most celebrated sculptor of his era, and yet for every acknowledgement of his unparallelled sensitivity in wringing human emotion from clay and plaster and stone and metal, it seemed there was a dear price to pay. See the rest.