Louisville Magazine is Louisville's city magazine, covering Louisville people, lifestyles, politics, sports, restaurants, entertainment and homes. Includes a monthly calendar of events.
Issue link: https://loumag.epubxp.com/i/853426
derbydinner.com LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 8.17 25 THE BIT Just as He ought By Jack Welch Illustration by Carrie Neumayer The Thinker is older but still none the wiser. JUST SAYIN' While reading Courier-Journal columnist Joe Gerth's June curiosity piece about the larger-than-life-size bronze casting of Auguste Rodin's The Thinker that sits in cogitation on the University of Louisville campus, I was struck by one unadorned disclosure: that Louis- ville's Thinker is the oldest monumental-size casting of Le Penseur in the world — older even than the one outside Paris' Musée Rodin. There are believed to be 28 castings of this size displayed in destination cities around the globe: Stockholm, New York, Copenhagen, Buenos Aires, Brussels, San Francisco, Venice. Louisville's is the oldest. To be sure, the bronze castings that sold for $11.8 million in 2010 and $15.3 million in 2013 were the original size, approximate- ly 28 inches tall (Louisville's is 79 inches) to match Rodin's project to re-model The Thinker as a separate piece after it had been an element in his goliath sculpture Gates of Hell. As it happens, both auctioned-off castings were made years after foundryman A.A. Hébrard, under Rodin's direction, cast Louisville's large-scale Thinker in 1903 to be exhibited at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Apparently, Rodin found enough faultiness in the casting to pull it from the fair and replace it with a plaster copy. A Baltimore art collector bought the bronze, displayed it for 40-odd years and then sold it for $22,500 to the estate of a former lawyer and Louisville Board of Aldermen president, which presented it as a gift to the people of Louisville in 1949. The city arranged to mount the 1,500-pound bronze on a stone plinth at U of L, then a private college. There was no bequeathal. Gerth became interested in the statue while studying data from the recent Univer- sity of Louisville Foundation audit, which contained a statement by Kathleen Smith, the ousted top aide to also-ousted U of L president James Ramsey, about ownership of The Thinker. Since the university has been part of the state system since 1970 and the statue is on its grounds, Smith wrote in an email, The Thinker is owned by the state, not the city. Let's hope this is not one for the lawyers. So what's the statue's monetary worth? A local estimate in the audit report put it at $30 million. Yikes. The city had better patrol the Grawemeyer Hall lawn 24/7 lest a flatbed truck full of state-sponsored bur- glars and a forklift doesn't ride up one night and steal our treasure away.