Dali House

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.

Charles X hands out the honours at the 1824 Salon at the Louvre in this painting of paintings by Francois-Joseph Heim. You can see it at the Louvre today, which isn’t nearly this crowded anymore.

Online murmurs of approval over a 2005 exhibition at New York’s Jewish Museum might leave one thinking that modern art and gossip have always been kissing cousins, or at least snuggle bunnies. I found the reviews of “The Power of Conversation: Jewish Women and Their Salons” inadvertently chuckle-worthy, though, of course, my mirth wasn’t exactly politically correct.

There’s something about salons anyway that reeks of absurdity. The most famous art salons – in Paris during the 19th century – were nothing more than droll competitions, with exclusion often far more damaging to an artist’s self-esteem than inclusion was any benefit. At best the salons were a shot at stardom, at worst a corrupt tool of elitist social climbers and hidden-agenda fat cats.

Leaving aside Leninist dialectic, though, the big Parisian salons were very much the Oscars of their time. All juried art competitions are risky sprints with dodgy rationales, but for generations, the Académie des beaux-arts’ official Salon de Paris involved major suck-up time, a fevered popularity campaign and, with the prize in hand, more viewers coming through the box office and thus more money in the bank, the better to mount next year’s entry. See the rest.