Last winter, a surprising group of sculptures appeared in the Jardin des Tuileries in Paris, most of them in the grass plots on either side of the “triumphal way” that runs down the center of the vast pleasure garden, with a few set near the paired pavilions of the Orangerie and the Jeu de Paume. The sculptures were all by what are now known as “historical modernists”: Auguste Rodin, Henri Laurens, Henry Moore, Germaine Richier, Alberto Giacometti, Max Ernst, David Smith, Etienne Martin, and Jean Dubuffet. These new arrivals were not the first twentieth-century sculptures to enter the immense, symmetrical precinct of broad sanded paths, clipped chestnut trees, formal basins of water, and over-scaled stone figures. The Tuileries has been host to a gathering of voluptuous nudes by Aristide Maillol since André Malraux’s reign as minister of culture, almost half a century ago, plus other pieces of more recent vintage. In the ...

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