Goitres, Growths, and Distortions: Rodin’s Balzac in Melbourne

From the moment Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) first exhibited his monument to the French author Honor e de Balzac at the 1898 Salon in Paris, it became the subject of ridicule and controversy (fig. 1). The daily newspaper Le Gaulois exclaimed, ‘Help me find something beautiful in these goiters, these growths, these hysterical distortions!’ The commissioning body for the monument, the Paris-based literary union Soci et e des Gens de Lettres, famously claimed it could not recognise the author Balzac in the sculpture and refused to accept or pay for it. Rodin responded by withdrawing the sculpture from the exhibition and transporting it back to his studio, where it remained until after his death. In 1955, more than half a century later, Balzac experienced an entirely different reception when it was welcomed into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the press release announcing the arrival of the sculpture, Alfred Barr, the museum’s director, declared that it was ‘one of the very great sculptures in the entire history of Western art’. This article examines the dramatic reversal in the critical appreciation of Balzac, which precipitated its acquisition by the Felton Bequest on behalf of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in 1964. The NGV’s campaign to acquire Balzac was not without its own controversies, and these are explored in detail using unpublished archival correspondence and gallery records from the 1960s. Unfortunately, the sculpture courtyard where Balzac was originally exhibited at the NGV’s then new St Kilda Road building was later abandoned, consigning the sculpture to relative obscurity in the gallery’s rear garden. More recent scholarship on Rodin’s late-career sculptures has provided new insights into the interconnection between his use of materiality, the object nature of sculpture, and the foregrounding of the artist through performative markings. An exploration of these themes in relation to Rodin’s Balzac provides a new reason for the NGV to celebrate its status as one of the departure points for the early twentieth-century turn toward modern sculpture.