Rodin and his own pavilion at the 1900 exhibition

In 1900 Paris held a world exhibition that drew tens of millions of visitors. Auguste Rodin was sixty, well known in France, and could have shown a few pieces in the official fine art section like everyone else. Instead he built his own pavilion on the Place de l Alma, just outside the exhibition grounds, and filled it with around one hundred and fifty of his own works. He paid for the building himself.

He could not actually afford it. The money came from loans guaranteed by a small group of bankers and businessmen who backed the venture, and Rodin spent months worrying in writing about what would happen if nobody came. The pavilion held marbles, bronzes, plasters and drawings, including large unfinished things that had never been shown. It was, in effect, a private retrospective staged at his own risk next to the biggest crowd in Europe.

Why a separate building

Two years earlier the Societe des Gens de Lettres had rejected his Balzac, publicly and with a lot of newspaper noise. Rodin had learned what a jury could do to a career in a fortnight. A pavilion of his own removed the jury from the process entirely, and it let him control the lighting, the spacing and the sequence in which visitors met the work. He had already tested the idea in 1889, when he shared a large show with Claude Monet at a Paris gallery.

The plasters were the surprising part. Showing unfinished and fragmentary pieces alongside finished marbles was not normal practice, and visitors who expected a sculpture exhibition found something closer to a studio. That decision did more for his reputation among younger artists than any single object in the room. The fragment as a finished work is an idea that leaves this building and goes into the next fifty years of sculpture.

Commercially it worked. Museums in Germany, the United States and elsewhere bought from the pavilion or shortly afterwards, and orders for bronzes came in at a rate that kept his foundries busy for the rest of his life. Before 1900 he was a French sculptor with a difficult reputation. After it he was an international name whose studio operated at industrial scale, with assistants, enlargers and multiple casts of everything.

• The pavilion stood at the Place de l Alma, outside the official exhibition grounds
• It held roughly one hundred and fifty works, including plasters and drawings
• Rodin financed it with loans guaranteed by private backers rather than by the state
• Visitors saw unfinished and fragmentary pieces shown as works in their own right
• The building was taken down afterwards and re-erected at his property at Meudon
• Museum purchases and bronze orders followed directly from the exhibition

That industrial scale is what makes Rodin complicated to buy. Bronze is a multiple by nature, casts were made during his life and long after it under the authority of the French state, and the difference between a lifetime cast and a later authorized one is large in price and invisible to most eyes. Anyone entering this market needs the foundry mark, the cast number and the paperwork before the aesthetics come into it.

What the pavilion left behind

The idea of the artist-run exhibition did not start with Rodin, but 1900 is the clearest early case of an artist using a world fair as a backdrop while refusing to be inside it. Gustave Courbet had done something similar in 1855 and lost money. Rodin made the model pay. The Musee Rodin in Paris now holds the archive and the plasters, and the sequence of that exhibition can be reconstructed from it. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds one of the larger groups of his sculpture outside France.

An artist who pays for his own building chooses the lighting, the sequence and the company his work keeps, and those three decisions do more for a reputation than most reviews.

LaArt editorial note

Rodin died in 1917 and left his estate to the French state, which is why so much of the work is concentrated in one museum. The pavilion itself lasted rather less well. It came down after the fair, went up again at Meudon, and eventually fell apart, which is a fairly ordinary end for a building put up on borrowed money in a hurry.