 Good evening everyone. Thank you for joining us to the latest in our series generously sponsored by the Lehman Foundation. My name is Michelle DiMarzo, I'm the Curator of Education and Academic Engagement here at the Fairfield University Art Museum, and it is my pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker, Martina Droth. She is the Deputy Director of Research and Curator of Sculpture at the Yale Center for British Art. She is also the Chair of the Association of Research Institutions of Art History and co-editor of the Born Digital and Pureview Journal British Art Studies. Dr. Droth holds a PhD in the History of Art from the University of Reading and her research focuses on sculpture and interdisciplinary approaches to practice materials and modes of display with a particular emphasis on British sculpture of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among her curatorial and co-curatorial projects at the Yale Center for British Art have been the 2017 exhibition Things of Beauty Growing British Studio Pottery and the 2014 Sculpture of Victoria's Art in an Age of Invention 1837 to 1901 which traveled to the Tate Britain the following year. And by this point you may be wondering why we have invited a specialist in British sculpture to speak in connection with our ongoing exhibition of sculptures by the very French, a goose rodin, which if you have not seen it yet in our Walsh Gallery, we hope you will. The connection lies in Rodin's fascination with plaster casts, a subject that we're going to be hearing a lot more about this evening. In 2017 Dr. Droth co-organized part of a symposium at Yale and also at CUNY entitled Casting the Curriculum the Parthenon Marbles Plaster Cast and Public Sculpture and among the speakers was our very own Dr. Kathy Schwab who is the curator of the University's plaster cast collection which includes more than 100 historic plaster casts including many from the Parthenon and Athens which was a particular site of fascination for Rodin. And it was from that connection that our invitation to Dr. Droth originated so I look forward to learning much more about the intersection of plaster cast and 19th century sculpture tonight. Dr. Droth. Thank you so much Michelle. Thanks for the invitation. I'm really pleased to be here. Yeah and thank you all for coming. Can you hear me? Am I near enough to the mic? No. No. Okay. Don't need to stand as close as this. Okay I can hear it. You can hear me now. Okay all right let's start. So when I was a student in in the 1990s Rodin was kind of everywhere. I don't know if you still feel that way now in your own in your own lives but I was studying sculpture as Michelle just mentioned. British photo to European sculpture and there was just no getting away from Rodin. He was really the most dominant and inescapable presence in in in my field and this was worn out in the scholarly books also in exhibitions and museums and from the very beginning Rodin represented an interesting contradiction to me. His work and the way that it was talked about was all about innovation, originality, modernization and the radical rake from tradition and often he was presented as a kind of a foil to the Bozar tradition you know that he was he was the one who overturned that kind of neoclassical style and yet for modern viewers whether it be museum visitors or tourists or art historians the work was also incredibly familiar and ubiquitous, very very well known and almost I would say to the point of Kitch and I'm just showing you this piece because I think it's so recognizable whether people are interested in sculpture or not it's it's just such an iconic work and we can think of many other artists and works like this and I think Degas little dancers and other really great other example in that in that vein we see so many reproductions of this work in many museums and it's become this kind of sweet thing and it's a very long way away from the radical and daring and highly critiqued work that it was at the time that it's making so those two things have long been in this kind of tension and I think they still are and there continues to be room to explore that. Back in the 1990s the discussions around Rodin were really quite exciting and perhaps especially because the stakes were so high given Rodin's phenomenal reputation and his ongoing incredibly high market value he was this significant unusually kind of international global figure through which intellectual arguments could be explored in such a way that they really meant something to the field as a whole so he was a kind of a focal point for certain big ideas and debates and he was also the subject of blockbuster exhibitions and those two aspects come together in a very interesting way in 1982 in a well known argument or well known as far as art history goes which played out in the pages of October the sort of high level intellectual journal and that debate revolved around exhibitions and markets reproductions and materials and specifically centered on the posthumous casting of Rodin's works and it was between two very famous art historians Albert Alson who was a Stanford professor of art history and a Rodin expert a consultant to Gerald Cantor and he played a big role in the building up of the Stanford collection I believe the largest the second largest collection of Rodin's work in the world and of course these we have some of those examples in this exhibition here at Fairfield so there was Albert Alson on one side and on the other side was the art historian and Columbia professor Rosamund Krauss so they represented two art historical generations and very different approaches to thinking about sculpture and modernism and what happened in 1982 was that Krauss wrote an article on Rodin taking as her starting point a blockbuster exhibition called Rodin Rediscovered which was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and here you see an installation view of that exhibition which she published in her article the exhibition was curated by Albert Alson the aforementioned together with Kurt Barnadot and Ruth Butler Krauss's article essentially questioned the validity of a 1978 bronze cast of the gates of hell which was kind of a showpiece work in this major exhibition and you can see it right there sort of towering over the rest of the space and by the way if you if you look at the archived web page of for this exhibition on the National Gallery website you'll see that it had over a million visitors so when I say that the stakes were high I think that's a good illustration of that here's a view of of the bronze cast some of you studying teaching art history will of course know these names Elson Krauss and Kurt Barnadot their work is very well inscribed into the literature now at the time that I was a student this was kind of or had recently unfolded it was still very fresh Elson died in 1995 he had been a really prominent name and and especially in the field of sculpture studies and even if you're studying British sculpture there's just there was just no escaping Rodin and Elson's whole identity as a scholar as a professor and as an art historian was that he was the leading authority on Rodin and if you look up his obituary that's exactly what it says and it tells us something important in relation to this debate his investment in it and also I think in relation to how art history gets shaped Elson helped drive forward the reputation of Rodin he played a really big role in reviving it so Rodin wasn't always this outsized figure it didn't happen all by itself and in fact as Leo Steinberg reminds us in his really great 1963 classic essay called Rodin which he republished in his collection Other Criteria which I recommend you all to read he reminds us that MoMA until 1955 did not own a single Rodin the Met he says had some Rodin's but showed only their marbles keeping the bronzes and storage and the small plasters which which had come with this gift that they had received directly from Rodin himself hadn't been shown since they had arrived in 1913 and maybe some of you who've been to the Met recently will know that they they have made a big effort in the last couple of years to re-display their Rodin gift so Rodin was being reshaped for art history in the second half of the 20th century and Elson and Cantor were part of this revival and therefore we have to think of Elson as a kind of architect or a major architect of the narrative but I think still rests very much with Rodin today Rosalind Kraus meanwhile was publishing a lot of really important work that was reshaping the field in a new way reshaping the kind of thinking and moving away from from scholars like Elson arguably not to the same popular impact even though of course she's an incredibly important person in the field of art history Kraus's account of the gates of hell and of Rodin those articles from 1982 still stand as an incredibly nuanced and thoughtful discussions about notions of authenticity and originality she noted that the gates of hell had been left incomplete at the time of Rodin's death that the posthumous casting was sanctioned by Rodin in his will when he he gave all of his materials to the to the French state and was taken forward by the state and it was perfectly legal and legitimate and casts continued to be made as this exhibition demonstrates into the 80s and they retain that right to produce up to 12 editions of each plaster but in her article Kraus also calls out the elephant in the room and she began by commenting on a film that had been made about the casting of the gates so I'm quoting from her from her article to some though hardly all of the people sitting in that theater in the museum watching the casting of the gates of hell it must have occurred that they were witnessing the making of a fake after all Rodin had been dead since 1918 and surely a work of his produced more than 60 years after his death cannot be the genuine article cannot that is be unoriginal however the answer to this is more interesting than one might think for the answer is neither yes nor no and I hope you got in this brief extract the fact she's not saying that the gates of hell is a fake she's saying that some of those thoughts arise and wants to question the contradiction that they appear to point to she makes an analogy between bronze casting and the making of photographs like printing from negatives and she questions the cult of originality that is so hard at work in the kinds of terms and expectations that exist around works of art and her central aim if we were to put it in a sentence was to get away from the binary language of original versus reproduction and point out the productive tension between Rodin's own ethos of reproduction and then on the other hand the rhetoric of originality that was used to characterize Rodin's work in his reception and the reception of modernism but Elson in his infuriated response flatly dismissed Krause's argument and either he couldn't or refused to see the nuance of the argument and then there's a further episode to this to this disagreement when Krause followed up on Elson's letter with her own response and it's really an incredible piece of writing and she dismantles Elson's letter piece by piece in an incredibly beautiful unaggressive and but conclusive manner and that letter was later reprinted as a chapter called sincerely yours in her seminal groundbreaking and still incredibly important book the original originality of the avant-garde and other modernist myths and the title of that book refers back to this discussion about the National Gallery's Rodin exhibition so it's a really important moment in art history and I think it still stands today as an incredibly interesting argument when we think about an artist like Rodin today so that was my was my initial introduction to Rodin these these debates and they left a big impression on me and then in the year 2000 just as I was finishing my PhD I saw an exhibition in Paris that stayed with me ever since which you know not all exhibitions do that it was organized by the Musée Rodin and it meticulously reconstructed this seminal solo show of Rodin's work exactly 100 years earlier this is a one-man show in 1900 at Place de Lama which which wrote down himself organized and here is a photograph taken in 1900 an installation view of the exhibition as it looked and I have one sadly only one installation image of the reconstructed exhibition that I saw in the year 2000 in those days photography was much more restricted in museums than it is now and of course we didn't we didn't have phones with cameras so I just have this one shot but maybe it's enough to you know to give you to show you what what they were trying to do in trying to set up Rodin's sculpture in a way that he had done 100 years earlier this exhibition was a really eye-opening moment for me because for all the theoretical arguments you always have to come back to the object and to the experience of the work and that usually takes place in museums and in exhibitions which for better or for worse structure these encounters for us and I fell in love with this idea of the of the reconstruction which of course is incredibly flawed and probably not always a good idea because it suggests the truth but probably introduces lots of false hopes too but nevertheless the intention is there to get back to a moment in time to get back to something closer to to what was once intended but more than that also because it means we're thinking not only of the object as this autonomous unit an isolated thing we're acknowledging the role that the conditions of viewing bring and we're thinking about what people saw what they might have experienced and what they might have taken away from that so it's thinking with a different mode and I think these intentions are really are really interesting especially for curators to to prompt us to think different curatorial approaches and it was really partly through this exhibition that I became very interested in two things which may seem like two different things but I think they're very interrelated and that is display on the one hand and materials on the other what I find striking about some of the images of Rodin's 1900 exhibition is precisely those two things how the work is displayed curated and the materials that we see and that's plaster and plaster and more plaster photographs and drawings all in one space the reconstructed 1900 exhibition made me think about how those factors play into the ways in which we think about artists what we decide to prioritize in terms of what we want to get out of the work our understanding of it and I began to appreciate that the environment and the presentational mode are very influential as are the kinds of selections that we make you know what we choose to show we can show we can show a very different world and depending on what we choose from the massive archive that he left behind but back in my student days I decided that materials in display would be something that I would prioritize and I've been so fortunate that I've been able to do that in my work as an art historian and and a curator of sculpture and and I've long been struck how in you know in my field 19th and early 20th century sculpture the material variety is incredibly rich and yet um not only does that variety not always come over but I wonder how much we really think about materials at all so today we have very different kinds of viewing and display conventions and there is an art museum aesthetic that's that we're very accustomed to that that feels very normal we don't really need to think about them so much um and what I what really struck me about this show beautifully installed here at fairfield is that um as well as being about Rodin and the kind of an introduction to Rodin and his work it is also about bronze and about reproduction and technology even though that's not the theme that sort of sits at the surface of the show but this whole show consists of bronzes and yet and I'd love to talk with you about this this later I wonder if it means that it makes us think about bronze more or if in fact it makes us think about bronze less because material has as I have found it has this strange habit of kind of disappearing on us so I guess that's what I'm saying about materials and display being interrelated that one can activate the other and they often do so in unexpected ways in these images of the Alma exhibition it's easy to see that Rodin really cared about the pedestals on which his work was shown um and he really cared about plaster the pedestals are plaster copies of architectural elements and his own sculptures sitting on top of those columns are also made of plaster so it's really striking this overwhelming presence of plaster and another thing that really struck me about this show and how Rodin chose to present himself was the gates of hell let me return to this bronze version which I think many of us very familiar with this is the work that sparked Rosalind Krause's interest in this dynamic relationship between the original and the reproduction and this is always the way I thought about this work but the version that was shown in 1900 and in the reconstructed year 2000 exhibition it didn't look like this and I'm afraid because it wasn't possible to take installation pictures I wasn't able to take a picture of the gates of hell in the show and this is the closest image I've been able to find to how I remember experiencing it when I walked through that exhibition and this is actually a picture of it in 1900 in the process of being installed at the Plaster Lama for Rodin's one-man show and I hope you can see even from this rather poor image that it was a rather undefined thing without all of the figures being really clearly marked out and today I think the figures on the gates seem like the most important thing about them but here you can see that Rodin was happy to present the work in progress not this incredibly elaborate finished thing so the very insistence on Plaster is an insistence on leaving something open-ended it suggests potentialities rather than conclusions so I became very interested in Plaster and the many different roles that it plays as a material in the in the history of sculpture there are two sort of primary ways in which Plaster was used in the 19th century it was used as a material for the reproduction and dissemination of monuments famous statues or pieces of architectural elements and these study collections and you can see that catalogs were produced from which you could order Plaster reproductions art schools modeling instructors artists might buy whole sets of such objects and put together a canon and this was considered so important in terms of education and culture in the 19th century that it prompted the creation of an international convention an agreement between various foreign governments to allow and encourage this practice moles could be taken from original monuments I mean imagine such a thing today right from the Vatican the British Museum original works and commercial producers were allowed to create and market Plaster cast reproductions of these masterpieces and as you will know from this collection Plaster is an incredible material it's very faithful and it you know can pick up every detail the big producer in Brittany was Brecciani he had a workshop in the British Museum right that tells you something about how central this was he was casting those treasures for dissemination around the world here in the USA the big producer was Caproni and you can they're still active you can go and see their historical collection and you can still order Plaster casts from historical moles and of course we have the Fairfields collection of Plaster casts many of them made you know at that time when the Plaster cast was seen as so important and there are many other art school collections around this country that still have these intact Plaster collections and Rodin had his own collection of Plaster cast after the antique and you can view them today in Paris so that's one very important facet of the Plaster casting industry in the 19th century a second important way in which Plaster was used was of course as part and parcel of the creative process and the Plaster model is the most important crucial object in traditional sculptural practices whether the end product was to be bronze or marble the starting point for a sculpture was usually clay model clay or sometimes wax but clay most commonly clay is incredibly unstable on a large scale it just doesn't last and so as soon as a sculptor made a clay model a Plaster mold would be made from it destroying the clay in the process the mold then presents a negative right of the object which you cast into a positive into a Plaster and your Plaster becomes the work and often svelters will refer to it as the Plaster original it was such a crucial stage in the process so Plaster generally takes the form of something that already exists and these two ways that I've just described in which Plaster was used of course they stand sort of at opposite ends and in the first instance I talked about an extant finished work in marble or bronze being molded and cast to make a replica and in the second instance the Plaster serves as a stage to producing a finished work further down the line in this picture they map to Rodin's Plasterland my exhibition we can see both of those uses of Plaster in work Rodin is using Plaster casts of architectural elements and he's using Plaster as a creative material for his work which may or may not subsequently be turned into bronze or or marble and in many cases all we have is is the Plaster and no other version was necessarily made so I want to just talk a little bit more about the sculptural process and there's a nice introductory paragraph in the in the brochure to this exhibition and I read it to you because I think it's quite relevant to us so it says if you walked into Rodin's studio and showroom most likely you would not have known if the year was 1897 or 1597 although he was untraditional in many ways Rodin produced his sculpture by following traditional studio practices virtually unchanged from those of the great sculptures of the Renaissance and later periods and I think this makes a really great point and I want to explore it a little more so in traditional sculptural practices the sort of singles form that we end up with that we look at that we see is the result of many other processes that are typically augmented translated multiple times into different materials and dimensions commonly involved in metal wood clay wax plaster marble and bronze so the final objects that we most often see or engage with say in a museum or in a public square are the aggregation of other objects that stand behind it before we even get to the plaster there is this whole cumulative use of tools and materials the involvement of multiple makers many sets of hands and skills a carpenter a metalsmith for the armature a mold or a caster all of these are specialized crafts and I'm just showing you this sequence of images from a sculptors manual someone you may not have heard of Albert Toft a British sculptor contemporaneous with Rodin a great admirer of Rodin and many of these manuals were published at the end of the 19th century to show how that process worked and it's very clear that sculpture is rarely the result of a singular or one author process once we get to the plaster a whole other set of processes and circumstances kick in in the huge archive that exists of photographs of Rodin's work in his studio from his lifetime there isn't that much that sets out the process there's nothing that sets out the process quite as explicitly as this but we can piece some of that evidence together that makes it clear that Rodin really did work with these very similar methods traditional methods to give you an example here is his monument to Victor Hugo in bronze in a public square it was cast into bronze after Rodin's death but we do have an interesting record of how he had envisaged it here is the plaster set up on a rudimentary platform on a rock so you can see that plaster casts were used to cite a work to situate position it let other people see it in its intended surroundings the people who commissioned it for instance and in fact this piece was ultimately rejected which is why it wasn't cast in his lifetime here you see it back at the studio with other plaster figures being being attached to it Victor Hugo's uses and let's just point out what we can observe here first of all we see Rodin in a suit looking on not working we see two people in overcoats working and we see these plaster figures being assembled you can see first of all their themselves are assembled from pieces you can see the mould lines on the arm for instance and you can see the sort of makeshift construction to get these pieces to stand together and to work together in a particular way of crates and pieces of wood so the work is really being kind of collaged together it's being assembled from parts it's not modeled as as a whole coherent unit from the outset as we might sometimes imagine and here we see the same work from a different angle again Rodin is with it but not working on it as such and I want to draw attention to a figure that you can just see sort of at work um he's got this cross-shaped instrument which is a pointing machine and I want to talk to you a little bit about the pointing machine which is not really a machine at all it's a simple wooden frame held together with clamps and nails very rudimentary and to this frame is attached a very precise measuring instrument a needle which you can just retract and and the needle is used to measure individual points on the plaster and this is a pointing model the big lumpy bits of metal are where you would guide that frame that wooden frame between this plaster and the block of marble and then you can also see those little those little marks like pop marks and those are little nails that have been hammered into the plaster and sometimes it wouldn't be nails it might be can you see the little pencil cross marks I think this hand would break this is Hiram Powers his Greek slave by the way his pointing model and you can see and you would break the fingers if you were to put nails into it so sometimes it's just a little cross mark just marked out in pencil and what happens is that the frame is moved from plaster to marble again and again and again and here you can see a studio where the plaster is set up next to the marble and a measurement has been taken from a point on the plaster and is and the frame has been moved onto the marble and the marble will be chiseled to try and get to that same depth a single figure can entail hundreds and even thousands of points and each statue can take months to make and I took these pictures in in the Italian town of Chietra center in Tuscany a marble rich area that has made this town historically important for sculpture sorry one more picture where you can just see you can see what happens and in the end you join up all of these points and this and this was taken in this studio run by someone called Marco Giornani and for generations this studio has specialized in translating sculptures model into exacting marble replicas and I was visiting a sculptor called Kevin Francis Gray who's responsible for that form there that you can see and I was writing about his work for Pace Gallery and amazing he had access to this to this workshop to see the work they carried out there which you can map onto descriptions published in the 19th century about sculptural practice almost exactly with this hardly any variation and I'm going to try and show you two some clips so this so you can see the plaster with the frame the pointing machine in the background and you can see that this is a very early stage of roughing out the marble he's not even using the frame right now he's sort of ascertained where his points are um and is manually chiseling that block and um and then just another very very short clip you can see perhaps here that um this is actually um I took these films at the same time and this is another sculpture that was at a further stage of um of production you can hear the sound of a drill um so some of these um artisans are still using just the hammer and chisel and some of them are using um a chisel that's um electrically powered but that's the only change that that's really happened since um since the 19th century so you can see the the pointing frame set up um and he's creating these little sort of notches under the arm so that he can then excavate that area it looks both crude and precise I have enormous respect for these people who are making this work see if I can get back to my present of view so I realize this exhibition is about bronze um but whether you're turning something into bronze or marble um I wanted to just show you how um how we can think about the labor and the craft the skill the steps the time involved in in making the objects that we see in our galleries but where we don't necessarily think so much about the material and yet each of these objects has been through so much um and um I think and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this I feel there's often a perceptual disconnect in in um you know when we encounter a piece of sculpture in a gallery you know how should we how should we look at it should we really look at it right in all its surface particulars the material characteristics the facture the kind of skin surface polished color or are we essentially looking through it to get at a large idea at a conception to which the material essentially means to an end you know the material captures and renders an idea are we kind of thinking beyond the physical thing almost and here in the exhibition of course we have this lovely small figure of Saint John the Baptist in bronze um it also exists there's a very large figure um here it is in the in the plaster gallery of the Museum of Gas and these two works are obviously related but I'm not sure that we have as yet um found sort of very good methods for thinking about that relationship and how it informs our viewing um what are we looking at and what are we looking for in each of these works do we need to know about one in order to understand the other or does the plaster or the small bronze present a sufficiently tangible rendering of an idea and um I don't really have an answer to that um I think my answer is to raise awareness about materials in process and to say that the very existence of versions variations replicas models additions reproductions is actually really interesting and points us back to the most common facets and characteristics or sculptural practice um it's part and parcel of what sculpture is and I think we can make a virtue of that and pay attention to what objects entail as things um in their own right and there's a universe of uh of meta concepts that we could think about subtleties concepts like intermedial dialogues medium sensitivity medium translation and modalities of materials and material perceptions I think there's there's sort of the absence of better terms of reference often allows sculptures distinctive processes to be sort of commonly channeled into these rather blunt polarized um binaries and maybe that makes us a little bit blind um to materials so really all of this brings us back to um Kraus and Elton um not claiming to have advanced um their arguments um but I really wanted to sort of present to you um my love and appreciation of materials my fascination with plaster is something that's often seen as um this kind of transient and intermediary and almost we're not really seeing it because we're waiting for the next thing afterwards and how can we get to um a different kind of looking where we see each object as something in its own right thank you to take questions but in a perfect world for you would any exhibition of Rodin's work involve sort of multiple modalities there would be a plaster maybe many clusters next to a bronze next to a photograph or next to a something other if they're drawing the process um I think it all depends on what you want the exhibition to do so no I don't really have have that but I guess my curatorial impulse would probably be to um to bring different media together and to do something that I feel um is difficult to do in the permanently curated exhibition space at least in my museum we're very um we're very wedded to our categories you know prints and drawings photographs paintings and sculptures um and I love exhibitions as opportunities where we can break down those silos and begin different kinds of conversations so I don't think um anything is right or wrong um but my own sort of um passion is is about um sort of piecing things back together Mel has asked it seems like what the Met has now done with Rodin Gallery that huge space and it clearly are we thinking um it's not just a transit corridor to the temporary exhibition really stop it and they're looking and there is a wonderful mix between terracottas marble bronze and then plaster cast it seems like the one thing they're missing between their video clips or photographs or maybe both and then they could get into this a little more I don't know if other exhibitions of specifically Rodin's sculpture permanent exhibitions um do that or installations is the Met sort of moving in a leading in this way um where it's joining yeah I maybe it's joining rather I don't know I don't want to insult the Met I love what they've done with their Rotan collection it's really really well done and when they first opened it they had a little exhibition of photographs and works on paper which was then dismantled because you can't keep that material up on the very long um but I thought I think they've made a beautiful um installation of the gift and that's the really that's the really key thing for me is Rodin gave them that material and they really thought about how how to present it as you know as as a whole I'm sure it's not the whole collection but but not to sort of discriminate between materials but just put them together again because that is what they what they received so I think um I think they've done a really nice effort um in doing that I just as a follow-up in thinking in terms of I love your your phrasing of that plaster of digital and I I run into many interesting conversations here at Fairfield while the plaster that's like a poster that you buy at the gift shop that has no value and I have been able to help people understand they have an extraordinary passion right and obviously the cast that we have are not the working cast of the artist this is something entirely different yet at the same time they take us they're a portal into a time and a place in a way that is quite extraordinary I absolutely agree and I'm so glad you said that um they are a portal to this moment in the 19th century when those the dissemination of this canon through this you know miraculous medium of plaster which is so faithful this catches so much detail and when that was just seen as um as an important way for people to be exposed um to these works so they are I mean they are historical material and what are we looking for I mean when we're looking at those classes we're not looking for the British Museum Elgin models we're looking at that thing in its own right so um sort of what I was trying to say about whether we're looking at something or sort of looking through something as a sort of a wishful transporting us into the British Museum maybe but that's not what these pieces are about they are I think they're incredibly powerful as um as these historical records from that from that moment when they were so important you know I um and some people have asked well is a plaster cast of work of art and this gets into a lovely nuanced uh situation and since usually somebody with great skill and expertise is making the cast it they're never exactly the same even if it's taken from the same mold they always do there's always a little bit of difference where the artist gets in there if it does something and so I mean I think that the group work in good period were all in part of a larger discussion about cast and they're fairly on a big influence in terms of interest absolutely which is great um I would say that the question of whether they're a work of art maybe isn't the most interesting question maybe we need to point in a different direction Harriet um just to add and another angle onto the cast here the cast collection Brecken City College which was among the first resets of cast upon to this country and we they're now on display at the Graduate Center in New York um but what we discovered was because the originals had had such rough treatment and our casts were made so early before they had suffered some demise that our casts today are closer to the originals and the originals which is a concept I'm still yeah yes yeah absolutely true yes um and yeah so they've they've maybe because of their neglect that people haven't interfered with them um you know are very much still true nobody paid any attention to that right yeah yes I'm rather shocked by the photos that you showed of the original display at on the Rugal and uh I wonder if what Rodin would think about this kind of display when we have these very neutral penisals and is it a distortion of his work or his intentions you have any ideas about that well I think he was an incredibly commercial artist and he may he may and he gifted his collection to the state and this was his his will for them to be reproduced in perpetuity I don't think he controlled how people how owners private collectors for instance would have set them up so they're gone and I think he would have been happy to let them go um I think I mean I think what's interesting about this and I think about this you know at at my museum too is um I do find it odd that we're happy to put and I'd love to know what you think Michelle we're happy to put sculptures onto these pedestals um you know MDF painted wood but we wouldn't we'd never show painting not framed beautifully so there is there is a sort of a weird thing about sculpture where our convention and the expediency um of how we display them has kind of taken over and this the pedestals kind of disappear or they do for me in the sense that you know that this is what we do this is our museum practice um but I think it is worth the thought that that that um painting frames which are also a very important area of study I think much more so than pedestals um that we you know museums care a lot about picture frames you know so that's a big and it's a big expense and we want to make a historical frame if there isn't one we wouldn't show a picture unframed but with sculptures it's we've gone beyond that and it's okay to be expedient so I don't know exactly why that is but I would love to buy a historical collection of pedestals from my museum you know these variegated columns marble columns or wood painted to look like marble which you see so commonly you know in 18th and 19th century collections to see and what would happen if we if we did our displays like that and thought about our pedestals and like picture frames I don't know what to think Michelle well Cary and I were just saying that we were sort of made nervous by that historical picture of Hamdenero and Talware oh yes very true we noticed our nice bulky we're trying to make them not get toppled over but clearly Ruden's not concerned about stability right I'm sorry he said auntie was doing plasters on those flimsy pedestals yes when we were doing the installation for this we looked at a lot of other museums to see how other people were installing them and I was I was really surprised by how many people were not doing what you suggest but using color on the pedestals in some really surprising ways that to my eye was distracted so that was why I chose this warm neutral as you described warm by neutral I I found the the colors I found them really I mean some installations had different colors you know kind of by section yeah and I know exactly what you're talking about yeah absolutely and I decided I did not want to go that way yeah we're in a Louis Kahn building with linen walls and brown pockets and our kind of mantras to go neutral as well and to try and just make them sort of disappear yeah not really looking at them yes what role does contrast like like color contrasts in some of these curations like in the original Ruden one match out he had a black backdrop to the whole thing with his blasters and in here we have the the colors with the dark bronze but in the recreation of her that show yeah I noticed that when I was looking back at these pictures and I can't answer your question I don't know if they talk about it in the catalog but it's a really great point and I wonder what color that wall was you know was it red was it you know if I don't know if in the world of the science of photography whether they might actually know the answer to that but I would be so fascinated to know what the colors might have been but yeah it's that's really difficult a really difficult question to answer because photography was black and white but sometimes we have records about colors written records or you know in the case of big exhibitions at the Royal Academy or the Great Exhibition we have lots of you know pictures drawings that were made and so we we can kind of think of period colors but I can't answer your question and it's a really good one well thank you Dr. Dras thank you all