Glasgow Museum: Damaged during outdoor exhibition in 1949
Management group “The damaged sculpture has not been found”
Rodin’s work management committee calls it “shameful”
Museums in Glasgow, Scotland, are unable to find some of the sculptures by famous French sculptor Auguste Rodin worth 3.5 million euros (about 5 billion won).
According to the BBC and the Guardian on the 16th (local time), Glasgow Museum officials announced that part of the plaster version of the ‘Les Bourgeois de Calais’ painting purchased in 1901 was lost.
This plaster statue, along with another of Rodin’s works, the Statue of Saint John, was exhibited at an outdoor sculpture exhibition held in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow in 1949.
Museum officials reported that ‘Citizens of Calais’ appears to have been partially damaged during the exhibition, and the whereabouts of the damaged parts are still unknown.
According to the Comite Rodin, a Paris-based committee that promotes and catalogs Rodin’s works, the missing part of the work is a two-meter sculpture representing Jean Der, one of the six “Citizens of Calais.”
Glasgow Life, the organization that runs the city’s museums, confirmed that the damaged sculpture was currently listed as ‘location unknown’.
Jérôme Le Blay, chairman of Comite Rodin, said of this situation, “When we lose a work of art, we also lose a little of our humanity.” He also said, “Museums have more than 100,000 works, so items sometimes get lost during shipping. It is also destroyed by war. This kind of thing is a part of life. “But it would be a complete shame to lose a piece simply through mismanagement,” he added.
He estimated that the plaster version of ‘Citizens of Calais’ would be worth 3.5 million euros (about 5 billion won) today.
A spokesperson for Glasgow Life told the BBC that the company had searched for lost works for 20 years and also carried out inventory searches.
A spokesperson said: “The recording, cataloging and management of Glasgow Museums’ collections has improved significantly since it was established in the 1860s. The storage of collections has also improved as part of Glasgow’s major museum capital projects over the past 20 years.”
‘Citizens of Calais’ was created to commemorate the six citizens who came forward to save the city of Calais, France, which was under siege by the English army during the Hundred Years’ War between England and France in the late Middle Ages.
French law allowed Rodin to produce plaster and bronze versions of ‘The Citizen of Calais’. The life-size bronze statue currently resides in the Houses of Parliament Gardens in London, England.
Source: Donga
Mark Jones is a world traveler and journalist for News Rebeat. With a curious mind and a love of adventure, Mark brings a unique perspective to the latest global events and provides in-depth and thought-provoking coverage of the world at large.