Size Matters: Rodin on the Plains

Did you realize that The Thinker is actually quite tiny? He’s about the size of a garden gnome, but lots less jolly. I recently traveled to see an exhibition of the works of Auguste Rodin at the Hillstrom Museum of Art in St Peter, Minnesota. The Thinker was in attendance, as well as thirty or so other of Rodin’s finest. I was struck immediately by his size. I had been given the impression that he’s a rather larger fellow, and in retrospect I wonder if my mental image had been unduly corrupted by The Thinker’s appropriation by Jesse Ventura’s gubernatorial campaign. It was immediately clear that Le Penseur, as Rodin referred to him, was not sculpted with the WWF in mind.

I’m a little embarrassed to say this, but the size had me a little disappointed, at least at first. And I’m sure that my trip to the exhibition only dramatized the contrast. I drove over an hour through the prairies of southern Minnesota: wide open spaces under a not-quite-endless-sky, hurtling past all that American bigness. Leaving behind the mini malls and office parks of the southern suburbs, the space gives way to orchards and car dealerships, train yards and fields, and, finally, not much of anything. Perhaps the journey altered my expectations – we actually drove under the shadow of an enormous Jolly Green Giant billboard cutout just outside of Le Sueur. So, walking into the museum I was really caught quite off guard.

There are actually several larger versions of The Thinker, made at various times after the appearance of the original plaster cast in 1880.[i] I was quickly made aware that The Thinker’s continued life in the popular vernacular has outgrown his scale. The image is re-invented so frequently that that it was striking to realize that’s its myth originated in such a tiny, singular, and seemingly delicate form.

I was even more surprised to find that I wasn’t looking at the original Thinker at all. Apparently there are complicated rules governing the reproduction of Rodin’s works – if I understand things correctly (which I may not), up to twelve casts can be reproduced from the original, at any point in time. So, even though Rodin died quite a few years ago, casts can still be made up until the magic number. Any reproductions beyond a dozen, however, fail to be authentic. I really think this seems a little odd. Why twelve? And wouldn’t size matter? The original Thinker is apparently 182.5 cm in height, which means that the one I saw in St Peter matched up pretty closely. But its size has nothing to do with its authenticity, which is guaranteed instead by the numerical order of its production – some of the large Thinkers are also authentic, but are closer to 2 meters in height.

Does this leave anyone else confused? The calculus of Rodin reproduction can get pretty complicated pretty quickly, and I’m not sure what it’s all indicative of anyway. At any rate, I wondered at the significance of this little thing I was looking at. Why had I traveled all this way to just to see this tiny reproduction? It wasn’t even original (but it was, perhaps, authentic, if you can keep up with the math). And would it really have been more impressive to see the original anyway? Would I have been able to tell the difference?

In telling a friend of mine that I had been to see The Thinker, he suggested that sculpture-watching was perhaps not all that compelling a sport anyway. I could mark it off my checklist, but what could it offer beyond that? Actually, though, I did find more in the sculpture than I anticipated would be there. The subject of The Thinker is not just a man lost in thought, caught in a quiet moment of distraction. He’s considering very serious matters indeed. The piece was intended to be a small component of a monumental portal to the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris. Rodin titled the work The Gates of Hell - and the thinking subject was originally intended to be Dante himself, considering his great poem (though in its final form The Thinker was not intended to have a specific identity). In the portal, The Thinker’s gaze doesn’t seem to be focused anywhere, except perhaps inwardly. This is indeed striking, because as he averts his eyes, immediately in front of him, a man falls hopelessly into Hell.

The image of The Thinker is often understood to be an immediately recognizable representation intellectual activity, but a close look at the sculpture reveals that this misses the point. The Thinker sits in such a terribly awkward pose – his elbow is on the wrong knee for instance – that its clear that his mental dilemma leaves him physically distraught. Surely, Ventura didn’t wish to project the image of a man thinking about the fires of damnation (but would it have changed your vote if he did?).

The Thinker sits precariously. His brief life is nigh at and end, and he well knows it. With that in mind, the tiny sculpture I saw at the Hillstrom somehow seemed more significant. What was this tiny lump of lead and bronze I was looking at? Was it really a work by the hand of Rodin? No, it wasn’t. And so it seemed all the more unlikely that this tiny figure should yet persist, encased in glass, attracting the curious from across rural southern Minnesota. Its delicateness seemed to signal all the more its unlikelihood. It managed to stave off its own oblivion, for at least a little while, and I was surprised to find that it somehow made me feel a little more cheery, wondering at this Rodin, that was hardly a Rodin at all.

[i] For a great discussion of the various casts see http://www.penseur.org/