Today, while most people here were gearing up for tomorrow's foot of snow, my wife and I went to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts to see a travelling exhibit on the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. The exhibit consisted of hundreds of pieces that completely muddied my concept of what is original and what is derived in terms of sculpture. Several of Rodin's most famous works were represented in multiple copies - some whole, some in parts. Some were masters or intermediates in the production of the same work in plaster, clay, marble or bronze. The labels pointed out Rodin himself rarely touched the marble or bronze but worked mostly in plaster. Some were unfinished or just trials as if he wanted to see what a nose would look like and did not care a thing about eyes. Some were probably done by Rodin himself while most were touched only by staff or associates tasked with turning his two foot plaster 'thought' into a ten foot bronze statue. All the pieces in the exhibit would be considered originals in some sense but it is obvious that there was no single original work for any of his major works. Comparing this to the attitude we have on original coins not to mention tooled, repaired, cleaned or repatinated items made me really appreciate the coins I love even if none of them would sell for the market value of the plaster left foot of the Thinker. Realizing that our coins are made from dies so might not be considered original and certainly are not one of a kind made me see parallels in the process of a sculpture factory. The concept of casts and aftercasts, electrotypes and outright copies that we find so troubling were part of the process for a sculptor of Rodin's style. In the end, he legitimized the products of his employees or associates signing his name to work that was part his and part theirs. That is where we are at a loss with coins since it is not always certain where official/original stops and other another status begins. II do not know exactly where I stand on some questions raised by this exhibit but I do have trouble calling original a bronze cast fifty years after an artist died even if it was made from parts created much earlier by a number of hands. Our coins were not the work of just one man but a team, a workshop or a mint. I knew that. What I learned today is that a major decorative art from the mind of a famous sculptor involved so many other hands over a period of years but still can be called original. If this exhibit comes to a museum near you, consider seeing it but when you are through go look at the coins where fine workmanship is not ten feet tall but ever so much more fine.
That's very interesting. Maybe you can get closer to the concepts you raise Doug, using the french words for art/artist and craft/craftsman, as in our language they have the same roots, hence a similar sound when you hear them so you can feel how tiny the border can be : art/artiste and artisanat/artisan For those visiting Paris, don't forget to go to the Rodin museum, which is located in a very cosy XIXth century "hotel particulier" and aside from Rodin's sculptures, contaning may of Camille Claudel's Q
As a photographer, I was quite interested in all of the old photos taken inside Rodin's shop. One in particular showed a woman working on a large clay statue. The exhibit did not label the photos but when I researched it after returning home I found she was Camille Claudel. It is a pet peeve of mine worsened when museums show things without labels. Too many times they show a really nice coin but fail to point out what it was that made that coin interesting. I could not work in a museum. I'd be in trouble trying to make exhibits educational.
Rodin used his workers as tools to create his art. Take him out of the equation, and you have a bunch of people standing around, looking for direction. In my book, "original" rarely means "solo." I'm reminded of Donne's No Man Is An Island. A composer writes a symphony, but unless an orchestra plays it, it remains nothing more than ink on paper, a blueprint. A Beethoven symphony is always Beethoven, but it is always something more - the collaborative effort of a great many people interpreting Beethoven. Recently I read, from a prominent anthropologist, that what sets human beings apart from other species is not so much the use of tools, but the fact that we have the ability to collaborate on projects of sometimes colossal proportions, whether we like each other personally or not. There seems to be some truth to that. As far as I'm concerned, originality doesn't depend on the number of people working on a project, but the vision behind the visionary.
The question remains of the status of a bronze made in 1982 from masters made before 1917. I ran into this when the photographer Ansel Adams allowed others to print from his negatives. In the 1970's I saw an exhibit of his prints from the 1920-30's. What I learned was that he was better at making negatives than making prints so the later prints made by assistants were better (but not more expensive). In the case of coins, restrikes are generally either cheaper or almost valueless compared to the originals. The market makes the rules.
Hello Doug, I bought this plaster copy of seems to be a work of Michael Angelo, these kind of plasters where used for learning to paint the male physic. Also van Gogh used one in a painting. This pieces dates from around 1880.
Many artists such as Leonardo and Michaelangelo worked like contractors. They hired bunch of skilled workers to execute work according to their design. Are those truely "original" work by the artist? I'm sure Michaelangelo made a clay or mud reference before ordering the Pieta. If that had survived, wouldn't it fit the definition better than the actual sculpture?
also, how do we credit an artist for designing a production procedure? How we do that when the procedure involved some type of non-reusable production medium that needs to be produced by the artist himself? Loss wax cast for example, if the wax master needs to be individually adjusted by the artist, do the semi-batched products count as his original work? What if the batch production was done by a factory or workshop? In my industry, 10% change voids copyright. If we count production design, then you can see how 10% is very easy to implement.
In 1955 C.H.V. Sutherland published a book, "Art in Coinage" of which the first half considers ancient coins. It does not discuss master ancient artists making designs that others execute, but I can imagine this sort of thing happened in high-volume Roman mints. With a few exceptions, I don't think Greek mints had volume so high they needed more than one engraver at a time.
This breadth of collaboration is becoming increasingly prevalent. It may be in part due to the need to "publish or perish" in some fields, and perhaps a desire to ensure no one is left out from receiving credit. I generally prefer to operate in small teams but was just noted as one of twenty authors on a patent. We all contributed, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to ascertain the relative proportion of each contribution. The same is happening in other fields as well, with the emergence of "kilo-authorship": http://www.wsj.com/articles/how-man...write-a-paper-apparently-thousands-1439169200 At least Greek engravers only had one name on signed dies, otherwise we'd need much larger coins!
