History of Art and Architecture

Colloquium

Wednesday, March 15, 2017 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm

202 Frick Fine Arts

Clarisse Fava-Piz: Reconsidering ‘Rodinism’ in the United States: The Case of George Grey Barnard’s Prodigal Son

This colloquium will be dedicated to a trial run of a paper I am going to present at the conference, “Rodin, l’onde de choc,” at the Grand Palais in Paris on March 23rd. (http://www.grandpalais.fr/fr/evenement/colloque-rodin-londe-de-choc)

My paper demonstrates how sculptors appropriated and recontextualized each other’s motifs within Paris's “salon culture,” in order to revisit the dominant role attributed to Rodin in the history of twentieth-century sculpture. In this talk, I focus on the case of George Grey Barnard’s Prodigal Son, the sculptural motif of which he appropriated not from Rodin, but from the work of a relatively obscure Salon sculptor, Ernest Dubois. By looking closely at the multiple ways Barnard recycled and transformed Dubois’s composition, I advance an interpretation of the Salons as an international space of artistic imitation and emulation in which Rodin himself participated, though he would come to be seen as independent of it.