Sculpture Garden

Since 2001, the Museum’s North Garden has been home to a changing exhibition of sculptures.  Two important works of figurative bronze art from the collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., have been on display since that year; Auguste Rodin’s Torso of a Young Woman and Laura Zeigler’s Eve. Atlanta artist Andrew Crawford’s Fiddlehead was added near the fountain several years later.

On the north side of the garden is Torso of a Young Woman, by the French sculptor Auguste Rodin (1840-1917). Rodin is perhaps the best-known figurative sculptor of the modern era. This small bronze torso was created in 1909, just a year after he had moved to the Hôtel Biron in Paris, which is today the Musée Rodin. It was, like many of his sculptures, not cast in bronze until after his death; in this case the Torso was cast in 1959.

Today a sculpture of a fragment of a body seems not at all unusual. However, in Rodin’s day, the only torsos on display were ancient Greek and Roman sculptures that had lost arms, legs and heads over the centuries. Until Rodin, appreciators of modern sculpture did not recognize the fragment as a completed art work. The arm, leg or torso fragment in a sculpture studio in the past had always served as the equivalent of a sketch for a painting: a study, made in preparation for a complete and finished work. Like his contemporaries, the Impressionist painters, Rodin chose to exhibit work in what was at the time considered an "unfinished" state. Rodin, Monet and others exhibited sketches and fragments that they believed captured the spontaneous moment of creation, produced before an idea became stale and solidified.

On the east side of the garden is Eve, by American sculptor Laura Ziegler (b.1927). Ziegler clearly works within the figurative sculptural tradition she shares with Auguste Rodin. However, Ziegler seems interested in expressing a particular emotion on the part of the subject - the anguish Eve felt on being banished from the Garden of Eden. Rodin’s work, on the other hand, is expressive of the artist’s interest in form and content; in other words, it is more about the artist than the subject. In Eve the viewer is drawn into the emotional world of the subject, not the artist.

Ziegler’s respect for the history of her art is clear here, with references ranging from the Renaissance to Rodin. In her rough surfaces and expressive use of bronze, Eve recalls the innovations of Rodin. Ziegler also seems inspired by an even older source: the great 15th-century frescoes in Florence’s Brancacci Chapel by Masaccio. Her Eve, interestingly, has a male prototype: she stands in a pose very much like the anguished pose of Adam in Masaccio’s Expulsion from Eden. However, Ziegler’s Eve is more contorted, more anguished, standing on her toes where he is flat-footed, and her head is twisted farther over her shoulder than Adam’s. Where we cannot see Adam’s face because his hands cover it, Ziegler allows us to see and feel the intense emotion in both the body and the face of Eve.

On the west end of the garden is Atlanta sculptor Andrew Crawford’s Fiddlehead (2001).  Fiddlehead’s abstract curves evoke both the fiddlehead fern, and the violin for which the fern is named.  It is part of a series of works exploring the violin form.  This particular form, made of welded steel but all sensual curves and swoops,  straddles the borderline between organic and manufactured, as is typical of Crawford’s work of this period.

The loan of the Rodin and Zeigler sculptures was made possible by the Museum Loan Network - a national collection-sharing program funded by the John. S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Pew Charitable Trusts, and administered by MIT’s Office of the Arts.  The North Garden’s entrance is on 7^th Street, on the north side of the Museum.  It  is open during regular LRMA hours.