THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Doreen Carvajal
 |
| Rodin Museum to deliver a new casting of “The Gates of Hell” to the Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim for display at the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City. Four more editions of “The Gates of Hell” remain available. |
FRANCE---At the end of his life, the sculptor
Auguste Rodin ceded his valuable art collection and plaster molds to the French state....The museum holds the rights to any works cast from its molds, allowing it to sell the pieces to raise money. French regulations cap the number of sculptures created from original molds to 12. So the museum is running out of opportunities to cast almost all of Rodin’s major works, although it can still cast from hundreds of molds for other smaller works. [
link]
 |
| “The Thinker,” has been cast the maximum allowable number of times. Originally named The Poet, the Thinker was initially a figure in a large commission, begun in 1880, for a doorway surround called “The Gates of Hell.” Rodin based this on "The Divine Comedy" of Dante, |
