Rediscovery of Rodin's Despair — and lessons in rejuvenation
For years, it sat atop the family piano, a purported reproduction of a piece from Auguste Rodin's monumental The Gates of Hell. Now, the 11-inch sculpture of a woman clutching her foot, locked in an eternal posture of defeat, has pirouetted into the limelight, fetching nearly a million dollars at an auction in France after it was outed as the real thing: Rodin's Le Désespoir (Despair). Created in 1890 and last sold in 1906, it was only rediscovered when the auctioneer chanced upon what the family thought was a fake last year. With the authentication, it has become a windfall for its unsuspecting owners.
The course of art history, of course, is not entirely new to such serendipitous events. Róbert Berény's Sleeping Lady with Black Vase, a 1927-28 art deco portrait of his wife, Eta, was rediscovered in 2009 when historian Gergely Barki spotted it in the background of the movie Stuart Little during a Christmas watch with his daughter. The painting, thought to be lost, had been picked up by a set designer from an antique shop in California and found its way into the movie as a prop. Vincent Van Gogh's unsigned Sunset at Montmajour from Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad's private collection had been left to languish in the estate attic after being dismissed as a forgery. Discovered after Mustad's death, it was finally authenticated in 2013.
Misplaced, mislabelled, folded into the fabric of the everyday, forgotten in time, such stories reveal art's stubborn endurance and its implicit ability to thaw into rapture. In literature, for instance, Franz Kafka, convinced of his own futility, had requested that his writings be destroyed after his death. That his friend Max Brod demurred turned Kafka's anguish into modernist gold. What Despair's reversal in fortune shows, then, is that genius mislaid is not genius lost. And that sometimes, the divide between gloom and glory is as fragile as a fleeting glance. In the right light — and with the right eye — despair may yet delight.
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