The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition

Abstract

of pieces in plaster that had lain on the shelves in storage at Meudon since the artist's death, closed off to the prying eyes of scholars and public alike. In other instances the work had not been seen because it had only just been made. The National Gallery's exhibition included, for example, a brand new cast of The Gates of Hell, so absolutely recent that visitors to the exhibition were able to sit down in a little theater provided for the occasion to view a just completed movie of the casting and finishing of this new version. To some-though hardly all-of the people sitting in that theater watching the casting of The Gates of Hell, it must have occurred that they were witnessing the making of a fake. After all, Rodin has been dead since 1918, and surely a work of his produced more than sixty years after his death cannot be the genuine article, cannot, that is, be an original. The answer to this is more interesting than one would think; for the answer is neither yes nor no. When Rodin died he left the French nation his entire estate, which consisted not only of all the work in his possession, but also all of the rights of its reproduction, that is, the right to make bronze editions from the estate's plasters. The Chambre des D6putes, in accepting this gift, decided to limit the posthumous editions to twelve casts of any given plaster. Thus The Gates of Hell, cast in 1978 by perfect right of the State, is a legitimate work: a real original we might say. But once we leave the lawyer's office and the terms of Rodin's will, we fall immediately into a quagmire. In what sense is the new cast an original? At the time of Rodin's death The Gates of Hell stood in his studio like a mammoth plaster chessboard with all the pieces removed and scattered on the floor. The arrangement of the figures on The Gates as we know it reflects the most current notion the sculptor had about its composition, an arrangement documented by numbers penciled on the plasters corresponding to numbers located at various stations on The Gates. But these numbers were regularly changed as Rodin played with and