Sculpture exhibit by Rodin — or is it?

What are you really looking at with the lovely, bronze Auguste Rodin sculptures, currently on view at the Whatcom Museum in Bellingham, or the huge black Tony Smith sculpture, recently installed at Seattle's Olympic Sculpture Park?

You might admire the strength of the sculptures and the ingenuity of the artists' styles. Auguste Rodin (French, 1840-1917) blended traditional realism with modern expressiveness and has become one of the most famous sculptors of all time, and Tony Smith (American, 1912-1980) was an important minimalist sculptor in the 1960s who added hints of humanity to his purely geometric, architectural sculptures.

But are you really looking at products directly from the hands of the artists?

The simple answer is no. Tony Smith's "Stinger" and the vast majority of the Rodin sculptures in the current exhibition share the thorny bond of being fabricated after the artists' deaths.

The issue of "posthumous casting" or "posthumous production" is not simple — it's complicated and contentious, with compelling arguments on both sides.

On the one hand, there are critics and scholars who say that there is a myriad of decisions that can be made during the casting process, decisions that simply could not, or should not, be made by anyone other than the artist.

These critical choices include how many finished sculptures, or "editions," should be made from the original model and what kind of finishing color and texture the work should have. Additionally, some posthumous casts are not taken directly from the original model, resulting in diminished surface details and in distortions in texture and even size.

On the other hand, if the artist gave permission for such decisions to be made after his or her death, then a sculpture that has been posthumously fabricated, directly from a sculptural model created by an artist during his or her lifetime, could be considered "authentic."

This is certainly the position held by the individuals and foundations that administer many artists' estates and by the dealers, collectors and museums that sell, buy or exhibit these sculptures.

The question is no small quibble in the age of mass-produced Chihuly glass objects: What's the market value of an artist-sanctioned copy or reproduction? The aesthetic value?

Rodins abound

A year before his death in 1917, Rodin composed a will that gave the contents of his studio, and the right to reproduce his models, to the French government, in exchange for an agreement that a museum devoted to his art would be created. Today, the Musée Rodin oversees the production of posthumous Rodin casts.

The Iris and B. Cantor Foundation has amassed a collection of hundreds of Rodin sculptures that were cast either during his lifetime or posthumously, many of them purchased or commissioned, from the Musée Rodin. The Cantor Foundation organizes traveling exhibitions of these sculptures and lends them to small and medium-size museums around the world.

These traveling shows are often accompanied by controversy. The exhibition on view at the Whatcom Museum, titled "Rodin, In His Own Words," is an example of one of these shows; it comprises 35 sculptures, most of which were cast after the artist's death.

Patricia Failing, a University of Washington professor of art history who teaches a seminar titled "Legal and Ethical Issues in the Arts," points out that "the Cantor casts have been controversial not only because they were created decades after the artist's death, but also because, legally, they are not fakes."

Failing goes on to state that "what visitors see in this exhibition is Rodin's vision channeled though agents of the French government and executed by modern foundry workers, who cast bronzes from plaster casts made from clay figures Rodin actually modeled. The bronzes can be marketed as 'originals' because authorship was legally transferred to the French state. The artist never saw nor approved most of the sculpture in this exhibition."

Whatcom County Museum's curator of art, Kathleen Moles, believes that it's essential to think about Rodin's own attitude toward creating casts. "He was all about promoting himself. He wanted his work and his fame out there."

In fact, Rodin was perfectly willing to have his works reproduced hundreds of times, if there were potential buyers. According to Moles, one of his most famous works, "The Kiss," was cast 319 times during his lifetime.

Honoring his intentions

The case with Tony Smith's "Stinger" is slightly different. From 1960 until his death in 1980, Smith was constantly experimenting with abstract sculptural forms. He created many fairly big works in metal during his lifetime, but his really large-scale works ("Stinger" is more than 32 feet long) were very expensive to fabricate.

So, although he always conceived of these monumental sculptures as being in metal, he would create their forms — to scale — in plywood. These mock-ups were painted black and exhibited, but they were never meant to be seen as the actual, finished works of art.

Tony Smith's wife, Jane, who died last year, was committed to completing her late husband's goal of fabricating his large-scale sculptures in metal. According to Sarah Auld, the director of the Tony Smith Estate, the artist had decided how many editions of each mock-up he would have produced and was able to oversee the fabrication of several of them. Auld states that the sculptures are "being made the same way now as they were in his lifetime."

Honoring artists' reputations and intentions is an admirable goal, but market forces are also steadily driving posthumous fabrication. There is a big market for posthumously-cast Rodin sculptures. These market forces — and our beliefs about individual artistic genius — help explain why the term "original" is so important to people on both sides of the issue.

A Cantor Foundation statement that accompanies its traveling exhibition says unequivocally that "all works in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Collection and Cantor Foundation Collection are original Rodins." The term "original" suggests a higher creative — and monetary — value than a possibly more accurate term like "authorized reproduction."

It's a matter of full disclosure. Some critics argue that the posthumous application of Rodin's signature on these sculptures falsely suggests the artist's direct creation of the works. On the other hand, the Cantor Foundation and museum officials believe that they are fully disclosing fabrication information through accurate labels that list both lifetime modeling dates and posthumous casting dates.

If you know what you're looking at, and know what the issues are, then you can make an informed decision as to whether it matters to you when these sculptures were produced. And you might decide to simply look at the works as they now exist.

These works are fine examples of Rodin's masterful, expressive approach to the human figure and of Smith's powerful configuration of the relationships among abstract forms, the surrounding space, and you.

"Stinger" by Tony Smith, on view beginning Jan. 20, 2007, in the Olympic Sculpture Park, Western Avenue and Broad Street, Seattle (206-654-3100 or www.seattleartmuseum.org).