Chez Rodin

There was a time a few years ago when the only U.S. sculpture well known abroad was the bric-a-brac-cluttered black boxes of Louise Nevelson and the swinging mobiles of Alexander Calder. And even Calder hardly counted, since most Frenchmen consider him French anyway (he has a second studio in Sache). But last week more than 13 tons of the New World descended upon Paris in the largest exhibition of American sculpture ever shown in Europe. The site, of all places, was the Rodin Museum, and the impact nothing short of formidable.

Just getting the show abroad cost the International Council of New York's Museum of Modern Art $35,000. There are 77 pieces by 37 sculptors. Well, only 76, since Claes Oldenburg's Giant Hamburger got caught in a rainstorm. Wrote a French critic: "Even in a country that has no great culinary pride, an 8-ft.-wide hamburger of soggy casein and canvas is artistically unappetizing." Noguchi's two-ton Sun had to be floated up the Seine on a barge, and Calder's two-ton stabile Falcon required a derrick to hoist it over the museum's walls.

Under the pensive gaze of Rodin's Thinker, mounting the show took the Modern's Director Rene d'Harnoncourt a full month. "For example," he said, "there was the problem of installing a 73-ft. chain to support Frederick Kiesler's Last Judgment. The museum was most helpful, but Rodin faces keep popping out in the strangest places."

During the opening week, Parisians were agog at Marisol's painted wooden beach group and George Segal's plaster Woman in a Restaurant Booth. Giacometti came, stared at Mark di Suvero's jumble of wood beams titled Champion, and exclaimed, "That frightens me!" At the vernissage, Cesar, France's leading sculptor of crushed cars, cast an evil eye on his U.S. competitor, John Chamberlain, but hailed the rest: "We feel much more affinity with America than with the School of Paris."

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